coindesk.com
Developers of privacy-focused Zcash ($ZEC) plan to add protections designed to withstand quantum computers within months as warnings about AI-assisted attacks put the broader security of cryptocurrency wallets under scrutiny.
“Our team plans for post-quantum signature opcodes to land in Zcash in January,” Roman Akhtariev wrote in an engineering post for Zakura, one of the programs used to run the Zcash network and validate its transactions.
Those opcodes, or instructions, would give Zcash the ability to check hash-based signatures, a method of approving payments designed to resist quantum attacks. While January is the team’s target, no confirmed network activation date was mentioned.
The aim is to prevent attackers from using today’s public keys to work backward to forge a wallet owner’s approval and spend their coins.
The upgraded software would produce a signature that the network checks using hashes, digital fingerprints made from secret data. Hash-based signatures use a different way to prove permission to spend.
Forging an approval would require defeating those hashes, so a breakthrough against today’s wallet keys would not automatically defeat the replacement.
Using fresh addresses keeps keys hidden before spending, and the proposed signatures are intended to protect the payment when spending makes its approval public.
Zakura’s post comes on the heels of a warning by Ethereum researcher Justin Drake, who on Thursday urged holders to prepare for a so-called “bunker mode,” warning that AI could find a shortcut through the mathematics protecting bitcoin and ether wallets “in months, not years” in the worst case.
Ethereum’s own broader migration to quantum-resistant cryptography has a target date of December 2029. No practical attack on their wallet keys has been demonstrated so far.
$ZEC ended Thursday around $1,185, down about 11% over the preceding week, leading a drop among top cryptocurrencies after Drake’s post went viral on X.
Read More: Bitcoin and ether holders urged to prepare ‘bunker mode’ against possible AI attacks
Fresh addresses, revealing balance checks
Zcash has two kinds of payments. One is shielded payments, which conceal the sender, recipient and amount. Transparent payments, in contrast, work much like bitcoin BTC$83,184.06, with addresses and amounts visible on the blockchain.
About 11.96 million of the 16.98 million $ZEC issued sat in the transparent pool on Thursday, roughly seven in 10 coins, according to CoinDesk’s calculation from ZecStats data. The January plan focuses on that public side of the network.
