Author: Ivan Pustogarov 2014-08-18 16:46:11
Published on: 2014-08-18T16:46:11+00:00
The writer of this message initiates a discussion on the periodic rotation of outbound connections. The motivation behind this is that each bitcoin non-UPnP client behind NAT has 8 outbound connections that change rarely, which allows attackers to identify users by listening for transactions in the Bitcoin network and recording the first 8 peers that forwarded the transaction. From there, if two unrelated transactions originate from the same set of 8 peers, the attacker can conclude they came from the same user. Additionally, Bitcoin clients advertise their public IP addresses, allowing attackers to link the advertised IPs with corresponding 8 entry nodes and deanonymize clients. By periodically rotating a client's set of outbound connections, their 8-peers fingerprint is blurred over time, making it more difficult for attackers to link different Bitcoin addresses of the same user. A corresponding pull request is available on GitHub (#4723), and more details can be found at https://www.cryptolux.org/index.php/Bitcoin.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T02:10:52.738894+00:00