Litecoin MimbleWimble October Recap Update

This update was written and provided by Litecoin MimbleWimble lead developer David Burkett.
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Audit
Quarkslab has finished their audit of the code! 🚀
I’ll be meeting with them Friday to discuss their findings. After that, they’ll work on releasing the audit report in a blog post, which I look forward to sharing with you all.
Findings
Since you’ll be able to read the full report once they share their blog post, I won’t dive too deeply into the findings here. But at a quick glance:
There was one critical issue found that resulted from a mistake while merging the MWEB code & v0.21.1 code together. So when copying the changes into the latest release code, I missed a small, but crucial line of validation code that could’ve been exploited by a malicious attacker to cause serious disruptions to the chain 😳
This tells us…
  1. We could really benefit from better functional test coverage around our validation logic to make sure we would catch similar issues ourselves in future releases.
  2. We should think about adding some processes we can follow to minimize the possibility of this happening. That could mean documenting all changes, or having 2 people perform the merge separately then comparing results, or a change to how we approach the code reviews.
  3. The audit was a really good idea (thanks Quarkslab!)
There were also some smaller findings, and some great suggestions for how we could improve the quality and safety of the code. Overall, they were impressed with the code quality, which was exciting to hear 🥳
v0.21.1 (Taproot) Release
The release process 5 we inherited from bitcoin can be quite painful. It uses gitian 4 to build repeatable and deterministic binaries from the source code. This means that multiple people can all build the code on different machines (and even different operating systems) and still get the same exact release binaries. We can then all compare the results and then sign the release, certifying that we all agree that the published release is safe & accurate.
There’s a lot of magic involved to make this work, which leads to a time-consuming & often frustrating experience (especially for n00bs like me). So I really dragged my feet on this one 😬. I finally forced myself to push through this a few days ago, and after fighting with some outdated scripts, was able to build all of the binaries successfully. I’ll finish signing these tomorrow and hand them off for the other developers to repeat the build & verify results.
MWEB Testnet
After lots of promises and then take-backs, I’ve finally decided to release a binary that allows non-technical users to try out the MWEB testnet. I only have the windows release available right now, but I’ll work on getting binaries for Mac OS X on Friday. Linux users can build their own, because I’m tired 😝
Here’s my gpg key 8 if you’d like to verify the binaries first (you should). I’ll add instructions on how to do that on the release page when I have some time.
There’s no installer, because I didn’t want anyone accidentally replacing their actual litecoin wallet, so to use it:
  • Download (and verify) the zip file
  • Extract the
  • litecoin-63fe928e4e8a
  • folder
  • Find and run
  • litecoin-qt.exe
  • from inside the bin folder
This will default to using the MWEB testnet, which you can tell by the off-colored logo and the [mwebtest] in the title bar. These use mwebtest coins, not actual litecoin coins. So pleeease don’t try to use it with real money.
You’ll either have to mine a block to get mwebtest coins (you can CPU mine a block in no time), or find someone to give you some. If anyone is willing to setup a faucet, I’ve got a ton of coins you can have 🙂
Also, if someone feels like writing a guide for how to create stealth addresses, send to and receive from them, and all of the fun stuff that goes along with it, you’d be my new favorite person.
Remaining Schedule
You’re pretty much back to just waiting on me again ⏱while I finish applying audit suggestions and then pushing through the tedious process of merging, coordinating final reviews, writing release notes, and finally kicking off the beloved gitian builds. I don’t know exactly how long that will take, but rumor has it that it increases by a full day for every person that asks me 😜
What a long journey this has been 😅
P.S. https://wenmweb.com 132 is up to date.