Merge pull request #5409

[VerusCoin.git] / doc / release-notes.md

(note: this is a temporary file, to be added-to by anybody, and moved to
release-notes at release time)

Block file backwards-compatibility warning
===========================================

Because release 0.10.0 makes use of headers-first synchronization and parallel
block download, the block files and databases are not backwards-compatible
with older versions of Bitcoin Core:

* Blocks will be stored on disk out of order (in the order they are
received, really), which makes it incompatible with some tools or
other programs. Reindexing using earlier versions will also not work
anymore as a result of this.

* The block index database will now hold headers for which no block is
stored on disk, which earlier versions won't support.

If you want to be able to downgrade smoothly, make a backup of your entire data
directory. Without this your node will need start syncing (or importing from
bootstrap.dat) anew afterwards.

This does not affect wallet forward or backward compatibility.

Transaction fee changes
=======================

This release automatically estimates how high a transaction fee (or how
high a priority) transactions require to be confirmed quickly. The default
settings will create transactions that confirm quickly; see the new
'txconfirmtarget' setting to control the tradeoff between fees and
confirmation times.

Prior releases used hard-coded fees (and priorities), and would
sometimes create transactions that took a very long time to confirm.

Statistics used to estimate fees and priorities are saved in the
data directory in the `fee_estimates.dat` file just before
program shutdown, and are read in at startup.

New Command Line Options
---------------------------

- `-txconfirmtarget=n` : create transactions that have enough fees (or priority)
so they are likely to confirm within n blocks (default: 1). This setting
is over-ridden by the -paytxfee option.

New RPC methods
----------------

- `estimatefee nblocks` : Returns approximate fee-per-1,000-bytes needed for
a transaction to be confirmed within nblocks. Returns -1 if not enough
transactions have been observed to compute a good estimate.

- `estimatepriority nblocks` : Returns approximate priority needed for
a zero-fee transaction to confirm within nblocks. Returns -1 if not
enough free transactions have been observed to compute a good
estimate.

RPC access control changes
==========================================

Subnet matching for the purpose of access control is now done
by matching the binary network address, instead of with string wildcard matching.
For the user this means that `-rpcallowip` takes a subnet specification, which can be

- a single IP address (e.g. `1.2.3.4` or `fe80::0012:3456:789a:bcde`)
- a network/CIDR (e.g. `1.2.3.0/24` or `fe80::0000/64`)
- a network/netmask (e.g. `1.2.3.4/255.255.255.0` or `fe80::0012:3456:789a:bcde/ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff`)

An arbitrary number of `-rpcallow` arguments can be given. An incoming connection will be accepted if its origin address
matches one of them.

For example:

| 0.9.x and before                           | 0.10.x                                |
|--------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------|
| `-rpcallowip=192.168.1.1`                  | `-rpcallowip=192.168.1.1` (unchanged) |
| `-rpcallowip=192.168.1.*`                  | `-rpcallowip=192.168.1.0/24`          |
| `-rpcallowip=192.168.*`                    | `-rpcallowip=192.168.0.0/16`          |
| `-rpcallowip=*` (dangerous!)               | `-rpcallowip=::/0`                    |

Using wildcards will result in the rule being rejected with the following error in debug.log:

    Error: Invalid -rpcallowip subnet specification: *. Valid are a single IP (e.g. 1.2.3.4), a network/netmask (e.g. 1.2.3.4/255.255.255.0) or a network/CIDR (e.g. 1.2.3.4/24).

RPC Server "Warm-Up" Mode
=========================

The RPC server is started earlier now, before most of the expensive
intialisations like loading the block index.  It is available now almost
immediately after starting the process.  However, until all initialisations
are done, it always returns an immediate error with code -28 to all calls.

This new behaviour can be useful for clients to know that a server is already
started and will be available soon (for instance, so that they do not
have to start it themselves).

Improved signing security
=========================

For 0.10 the security of signing against unusual attacks has been
improved by making the signatures constant time and deterministic.

This change is a result of switching signing to use libsecp256k1
instead of OpenSSL. Libsecp256k1 is a cryptographic library
optimized for the curve Bitcoin uses which was created by Bitcoin
Core developer Pieter Wuille.

There exist attacks[1] against most ECC implementations where an
attacker on shared virtual machine hardware could extract a private
key if they could cause a target to sign using the same key hundreds
of times. While using shared hosts and reusing keys are inadvisable
for other reasons, it's a better practice to avoid the exposure.

OpenSSL has code in their source repository for derandomization
and reduction in timing leaks, and we've  eagerly wanted to use
it for a long time but this functionality has still not made its
way into a released version of OpenSSL. Libsecp256k1 achieves
significantly stronger protection: As far as we're aware this is
the only deployed implementation of constant time signing for
the curve Bitcoin uses and we have reason to believe that
libsecp256k1 is better tested and more thoroughly reviewed
than the implementation in OpenSSL.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/161.pdf