Author: Sebastian Falbesoner 2020-04-02 15:26:40
Published on: 2020-04-02T15:26:40+00:00
Sebastian, an independent researcher, has reported an odd behavior in BIP37 bloom filters while experimenting with the functional test for p2p_filter.py. According to BIP37, 'getdata' commands are only responded to if a filter is set. When no BIP37 is set and we request a filtered block, there should be no response from the node, but what indeed happens is that we always get a 'merkleblock' message in reply. This issue arose because there is always a default filter set that matches everything, which was introduced in v0.8.4. Sebastian is seeking suggestions on how to deal with this problem since it leads to a few "dead code"-spots in the code base. Whenever there is a check if a filter is set, the corresponding else-branch is never executed.Further details on how to reproduce this issue and where the relevant code parts are can be found on the corresponding GitHub issue #18483. Andreas Schildbach has already pointed out that this could be a problem for the clients and suggests that the connection should be dropped to clients that request filtered blocks without any filter set.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T21:55:11.716767+00:00