xenog

I have been using Shadow for a couple of months from my fast and stable gigabit FTTH connection. My ping to their servers is about 20 ms, and I have to make a conscious effort to notice any input lag. Some of you may argue my brain is slow. I can assure you it is not.

On the other hand, I got Stadia a couple of days ago, and although graphics work very well, input lag is unbearable. Some streaming users will experience input lag because their Internet connections cannot handle it, but that is not my case.

It's sad because I live in Dublin. Google has servers here. Shadow's servers are in the Netherlands. I'm very disappointed at the level of incompetence that Google displayed on this release. They have enough data centres, money and quality network connections to pull this off properly, yet they didn't. Shadow, a small French company streaming remote Windows PCs, did a much better job running standard Windows games that are not purposefully made to be streamed.

This in an isightful comment. Lazy evaluation combined with the level of abstraction in Haskell could make this micromanagement somewhat hard to implement. It is in our roadmap to revisit the cryptography implementation.

Be careful when running the code in a way that can lead to an attacker finding a way to use a timing attack. Anywhere where signatures are done automatically could lead to potential problems. This is also true for Electrum, that implements its own crypto too, and browser-based clients.

The correctness of the implementation is not worrying me at this point. ECDSA is not too complex to implement. We have QuickCheck tests, and many others that make us confident that the code works well, or at least that it does what it intends.

I'm more worried about more sophisticated attacks, like timing attacks, for example. But I don't see how that can be used to attack this particular application.

I am one of the authors of Haskoin. We have had internal discussions on this topic. It was agreed that we wanted to minimize dependencies to code written in another programming language, which was the reason we did not choose one of the existing C++ crypto libraries, such as OpenSSL. My colleague Philippe, who wrote the crypto code, deemed the existing Haskell crypto libraries unsuitable. Hence we rolled our own ECDSA.