Author: Ivan Pustogarov 2014-08-18 18:37:21
Published on: 2014-08-18T18:37:21+00:00
The article discusses the periodic rotation of outbound connections, where every 2-10 minutes an outbound connection is dropped and replaced by a new one. It is suggested that if a client rotates its outbound connections, sooner or later it will connect to a malicious peer. Moreover, revealing the origin of a distinct transaction is tolerable as the learned public IP can be shared by several users. Rotation will help against low-resource attackers with no peers at all. However, if a client's 8 outbound connections stay the same for a long time, an attacker who listens to the Bitcoin network can link together different BC addresses and learn the IP of the client. The 8 entry peers are unique per client so if two users share the same IP, they can be distinguished. In order to protect himself from this specific attack, a client can also set only 3-4 outbound connections, so the proposed modification is just another potential defence. If it is useful for other things, it's great. Connection rotation would be fine for improving a node's knowledge about available peers and making the network stronger against partitioning. However, the motivation behind constant rotation is opposite the behavior. Ultimately, since the traffic is clear text, if you expect to have any privacy at all in your broadcasts, you should be broadcasting over tor or i2p. Outbound connections are still rotated from time to time due to remote side disconnections. Plus, outbound connections do not survive BC client restarts (unlike Tor Guard nodes).
Updated on: 2023-06-09T02:10:20.014459+00:00