Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin suggested using “transaction simulation” and other similar features to improve the user experience and security of Ethereum wallets and intelligent contracts.
In Sunday’s post to X Buterin he argued that security and user experience are not separate fields, as they are both about user intent – ensuring that protocols do what users intended them to do.
Buterin said an intent-based approach to security could involve designing systems that carefully check user actions and could apply to Ethereum wallets and intelligent contracts, as well as operating systems and hardware more broadly.
“The user first determines what action they want to take and then clicks ‘OK’ or ‘Cancel’ after viewing a simulation of the consequences of that action on the network,” he said.
Other ways may include spending limits and multi-signature approvals, so fulfillment only happens when user intent, expected outcome and risk limits are in line, he said.
As a result, it should be easier to do low-risk things and harder to do threatening things, Buterin said.
User intent is challenging to define
However, Buterin noted that defining user intent is “extremely complex” and is one of the reasons why there is no such thing as a “perfect security” solution:
“[It’s not] because the machines are “flawed”, or even because the people designing the machines are “flawed”, but because the “user intent” is essentially an extremely complex object that the user himself cannot easily access.
“I would argue that the common feature of a good solution is that the user specifies his or her intent in multiple, overlapping ways, and the system only works when those specifications are consistent with each other,” he said.
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Security is one of the three elements of the blockchain trilemma, along with decentralization and scalability.
The concept invented by Buterin is that blockchains can optimize two of these aspects, but must compromise on the second.
Decentralization and scalability have arguably been major topics in the Ethereum ecosystem in recent years, particularly in the latter given that the Ethereum mainnet lags behind some of its largest Layer 1 competitors in terms of scalability.
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