Author: Jeff Garzik 2011-08-05 05:52:05
Published on: 2011-08-05T05:52:05+00:00
The email thread between John Smith and Jeff Garzik discusses the security testing of the Bitcoin network. They mention that a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) possibility can shut down many nodes that accept incoming connections as their numbers are small. They also discuss the re-broadcasting of transactions by the recipient, allowing both the sender and receiver to be found. Garzik's suggestion of using User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets with spoofed sender addresses is interesting as UDP has an advantage of opening an "inbound" UDP port on almost any NAT router without any UPNP magic. However, clients require special privileges to spoof sender addresses, and some ISPs may filter out packets with non-matching sender addresses. In addition, it is possible to implement TCP over UDP, although Garzik is not endorsing a bitcoin-internal TCP stack.
Updated on: 2023-05-26T19:57:27.304150+00:00