BIP 77: Payjoin Version 2 — Async Payjoin

[DanGould]

This document proposes an asynchronous, backwards-compatible second version of the payjoin protocol described in BIP 78, enabling complete payjoin receiver functionality including payment output substitution with only an HTTP client rather than server. The former requirement for receivers to run HTTP servers is replaced with an untrusted third-party "payjoin directory" store-and-forward server accessed by polling clients which communicate using an asynchronous protocol and authenticated, encrypted payloads. It was originally proposed to the mailing list here.

The protocol design has received rounds of review elsewhere on the bitcoin-dev mailing list as well.

Feedback from that list post has been incorporated into this draft.

Proposing this as an Standards Track BIP to ensure wallets across the ecosystem can come to rough consensus on a single asynchronous payjoin standard and correctly implement it widely.

[luke-jr]

Let's call this BIP 77

[murchandamus]

Hi @DanGould, the first comment on this PR seems to indicate that this proposal is still WIP. Is that an accurate understanding? If this PR is not yet ready to be merged, perhaps it should be changed to "Draft". If I misunderstood the status of this PR, please respond below so someone may review to assess whether this is ready for merge.

[DanGould]

The main changes from the last review are that

• HTTP request methods (POST, GET, PUT) control the flow of the protocol rather than further path subdiretories
• bip21 parameters (pj subdirectory and ohttp key config) serialize as compressed public keys to shorten the URI
• Use PSBTv0 since PSBTv2 support is still very limited
• explicitly mention the format of the ohttp KeyConfiguration URL fragment

[1440000bytes]

NACK

This BIP is bad for privacy and lacks details in "attack vectors" section. Please be careful while implementing.

[jonatack]

NACK

This BIP is bad for privacy

Can you provide the reasoning, please?

[1440000bytes]

NACK

This BIP is bad for privacy

Can you provide the reasoning, please?

Risks with accepting donations using payjoin:

• Probing: Already mentioned in BIP 78
• Small donations: Best form of attack in which FBI donates some sats to support their work and know all the UTXOs in the wallet

[1440000bytes]

Example: https://hrf.org/payjoin

[thebrandonlucas]

Risks with accepting donations using payjoin:

• Probing: Already mentioned in BIP 78 but BIP 77 author too emotional to accept it
• Small donations: Best form of attack in which FBI donates some sats to support their work and know all the UTXOs in the wallet

@1440000bytes Your first point has already been addressed and he has added a link to the attack vectors section on BIP-78. No one is "not accepting" anything. Are you asking that the full explanation given on probing attacks in BIP-78 be redundantly added here? What exactly is your criticism?

Your second point has already been addressed in BIP-78, here is what the link that you suggested be added says:

While we cannot prevent this type of attack entirely, we implemented the following mitigations:

- When the receiver detects an original transaction being broadcast, or if the receiver detects that the original transaction has been double spent, then they will reuse the UTXO that was exposed for the next payjoin.
- While the exposed UTXO will be reused in priority to not leak other UTXOs, there is no strong guarantee about it. This prevents the attacker from detecting with certainty the next payjoin of the merchant to another peer.

BIP-78 already explains what can be done to mitigate this, and fully acknowledges this tradeoff.
Can you explain, in terms of probing attacks, how BIP-77 would be worse for privacy than the already accepted BIP-78?

[nothingmuch]

The sender could first register an additional session subdirectory for the response, and include the associated public key along with the original PSBT when posting to the receiver's subdirectory. The sender would then respond in the sender's subdirectory.

Eliminating the request/response distinction would avoid a metadata leak, namely whether or not the payjoin flow was completed, since requests and responses would be indistinguishable.

A followup suggestion would be removing explicit session initialization. Incidentally in the reference directory it appears that since post_session is stateless, calling it before other operations is indeed not enforced. GET & POST handlers do appear to validate the id path component, but if they did then the first successful request would indicate to either party that the subdirectory ID is valid (or perhaps arbitrary IDs were allowed by design?)

Timing analysis of subdirectory polling could still leak information about which payjoin requests were responded to, but aggressive clients could mitigate this by maintaining a pool of pre-allocated and randomly polled subdirectories ahead of time, and by responding to themselves in some of them with dummy payloads to generate random cover traffic.

[DanGould]

@nothingmuch I'll write up your suggestions to simplify the protocol. It makes the directory implementation simpler, requires fewer protocol message types, and even reduces bandwidth. wowza

The sender could first register an additional session subdirectory ... and include the associated public key along with the original PSBT

HPKE E2EE deployed in this application in Authenticated mode (akin to Noise Framework's IK model) already requires the sender to include their session public key as associated data, so this is an pretty darn easy change to make. The change not only simplifies the protocol messaging, but as you say eliminates a metadata leak. I'm a big fan.

A followup suggestion would be removing explicit session initialization

This makes sense too. Creating separate subdirectory resources for either sender or receiver on POST then GETting updates to replace the repeated sender POST polling reduces bandwidth too, since the GET request doesn't contain that repeat POST body.

Even without aggressive client mitigation of the remaining client leaks subject to timing analysis assuming this suggestion is put in place, your new design deletes complexity and improves efficiency.

I'll update the BIP to the best of my understanding based on your comment and link it to a rust-payjoin issue to implement. This spec has already made some breaking changes since the last directory release, so it's a good time for another one since we won't break production implementations other than our own.

Edit: Is there a potential authorization issue now that the sender POSTs first? In the current design of the protocol, only the receiver might need authorization from the directory in order to initialize a session subdirectory, and having knowledge of a session public key was sufficient for the sender to use an initialized subdirectory. Now, the sender would also need to obtain authorization somehow, since the directory doesn't yet know about the session the receiver has implicitly initiated by communicating directly with the sender, out of band from the directory. We'll have to work out how this might affect the expiration mechanic as well.

[spacebear21]

Some minor clarifications following the "original"/"proposal" payjoin PSBT terminology established in BIP78.

[spacebear21]

I struggled a bit to grok the new messaging flow. After reading through the implementation I think I get it now and left some corrections/clarification suggestions throughout.

[spacebear21]

Suggested change

	===Receiver's Proposal PSBT checklist===
	The receiver checklist is the same as the [[https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0078.mediawiki#receivers-original-psbt-checklist| the BIP 78 receiver checklist]], except for the "Verify that the payjoin proposal did not introduce mixed input's type" step, which may be ignored.
	===Receiver's Original PSBT checklist===
	The receiver checklist is the same as the [[https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0078.mediawiki#receivers-original-psbt-checklist| the BIP 78 receiver checklist]], except for the "If the sender's inputs are all from the same scriptPubKey type, the receiver must match the same type" step, which may be ignored.

[murchandamus]

Maybe use "output script" instead of "scriptPubKey" since this document also uses "input script" elsewhere.

[murchandamus]

This is looking great. I did not notice any blocking formatting issues, and it appears to fulfill all formal criteria to get merged. Please let me know when you have concluded addressing the outstanding review comments and are ready for it to get merged.

Would it be viable to provide test vectors for this proposal? If so, I would suggest that some be added before this proposal is advanced to "Proposed".

[murchandamus]

This extraneous pipe character doesn’t seem to show up anywhere, but still seems to be a syntax error.

Suggested change

The BIP 78 standard allows for an [[https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0078.mediawiki#unsecured-payjoin-server| unsecured Payjoin server|]] to operate separately from the so-called "payment server" responsible for generating [[https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0021.mediawiki| BIP 21]] request URIs. Because BIP 78 messages relayed over an unsecured server are neither end-to-end authenticated nor encrypted between sender and receiver, a malicious unsecured Payjoin server is able to modify the Proposal PSBT in flight, thus requiring payment output substitution to be disabled. Output substitution is useful for a number of block space optimizations, including payment batching and transaction cut-through. This proposal introduces authentication and encryption to secure output substitution by using a directory server without compromising sender or receiver privacy.

The BIP 78 standard allows for an [[https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0078.mediawiki#unsecured-payjoin-server| unsecured Payjoin server]] to operate separately from the so-called "payment server" responsible for generating [[https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0021.mediawiki| BIP 21]] request URIs. Because BIP 78 messages relayed over an unsecured server are neither end-to-end authenticated nor encrypted between sender and receiver, a malicious unsecured Payjoin server is able to modify the Proposal PSBT in flight, thus requiring payment output substitution to be disabled. Output substitution is useful for a number of block space optimizations, including payment batching and transaction cut-through. This proposal introduces authentication and encryption to secure output substitution by using a directory server without compromising sender or receiver privacy.

[murchandamus]

It sounds like this proposal builds on BIP 21 URI Scheme, BIP 174 PSBT, and expands on BIP 78, so perhaps those should be listed as requirements:

Suggested change

	License: BSD-2-Clause
	License: BSD-2-Clause
	Requires: 21, 78, 174

or even replacement:

Suggested change

	License: BSD-2-Clause
	License: BSD-2-Clause
	Requires: 21, 174
	Replaces: 78

[murchandamus]

Just wondering, is this proposal only compatible with PSBT v0, or also PSBT v2?
Perhaps it would make sense for this proposal to consider whether this proposal will be compatible with the efforts in "Bip Draft: Sending Silent Payments in PSBTs #1687" to ensure that it will be possible in the future to create Silent Payments-based Payjoins?

[murchandamus]

Suggested change

	* Include complete UTXO data.
	* Include complete UTXO data.
	* Insert additional outputs or additional inputs at random indices while retaining the order of existing inputs and outputs.

[murchandamus]

It seems to me that the latter should also be mentioned in the "MUST" block above (see above) and then this could be reduced to the MUST NOT part:

Suggested change

	* Shuffle the order of inputs or outputs; the additional outputs or additional inputs must be inserted at a random index.
	* Shuffle the order of existing inputs or outputs.

[murchandamus]

Typo:

Suggested change

An production reference implementation client can be found at [[https://crates.io/crates/payjoin-cli]]. Source code for the clients, the Payjoin Directory, and development kit may be found here: [[https://github.com/payjoin/rust-payjoin]]. Source code for an Oblivous HTTP relay implementation may be found here [[https://github.com/payjoin/ohttp-relay]]. The reference implementation may be configured to the following independent production relays as of 24/09/26:

An production reference implementation client can be found at [[https://crates.io/crates/payjoin-cli]]. Source code for the clients, the Payjoin Directory, and development kit may be found here: [[https://github.com/payjoin/rust-payjoin]]. Source code for an Oblivious HTTP relay implementation may be found here [[https://github.com/payjoin/ohttp-relay]]. The reference implementation may be configured to the following independent production relays as of 24/09/26:

[murchandamus]

I’m not sure whether specifying "production relays" in the BIP makes sense as that information will almost inevitably outdate.

I also think that "production relays" synonymously refers to what was previously called "Payjoin Directory". Please do not use synonyms but settle on one term.

via https://courses.lumenlearning.com/olemiss-technicalwriting/chapter/unit-3-using-appropiate-language-and-tone-avoiding-confusing-terms-lecture-2/

[murchandamus]

It is clearer to repeat the active agent by name:

Suggested change

This document proposes a backwards-compatible second version of the Payjoin protocol described in [[bip-0078.mediawiki|BIP 78]], allowing complete Payjoin receiver functionality, including payment output substitution, without requiring one to host a secure public endpoint. This requirement is replaced with an untrusted third-party directory accessed via HTTP clients that communicate using an asynchronous protocol and authenticated, encrypted payloads. Authenticated encryption depends only on cryptographic primitives available in Bitcoin Core. Requests use [[https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc9458.html| Oblivious HTTP]] to prevent the directory and Payjoin peers from linking requests to client IP addresses.

This document proposes a backwards-compatible second version of the Payjoin protocol described in [[bip-0078.mediawiki|BIP 78]], allowing complete Payjoin receiver functionality, including payment output substitution, without requiring the receiver to host a secure public endpoint. This requirement is replaced with an untrusted third-party directory accessed via HTTP clients that communicate using an asynchronous protocol and authenticated, encrypted payloads. Authenticated encryption depends only on cryptographic primitives available in Bitcoin Core. Requests use [[https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc9458.html| Oblivious HTTP]] to prevent the directory and Payjoin peers from linking requests to client IP addresses.

[murchandamus]

Please also link to all relevant mailing list threads via the Post-History header.

[murchandamus]

Many visitors of the BIPs repository may first become aware of this proposal per the title. Does writing out "version 2" provide the biggest bang for the buck?

What do you think about:

Suggested change

	Title: Payjoin Version 2 — Async Payjoin
	Title: Payjoin v2—Async Payjoin

Or even:

Suggested change

	Title: Payjoin Version 2 — Async Payjoin
	Title: Async Payjoin