Author: Ivan Pustogarov 2014-08-18 21:02:57
Published on: 2014-08-18T21:02:57+00:00
Bitcoin peers maintain a history of addresses that are forwarded to each neighbour. If an address has already been forwarded, it is not retransmitted. An attacker can obtain potential IP addresses of clients and then periodically spam the network with this list. The attacker clears the retransmission history for their connections only by reconnecting to Bitcoin peers after each spam round. When a NAT client connects to the network and advertises its address, the addresses propagate to the attacker's connections only. This attack was discussed on Bitcointalk.org and described in detail on Cryptolux.org. Each NATed client connects to the Bitcoin network through eight entry peers and advertises its public IP address to them. This allows an attacker to create a mapping of the client's IP address. However, there is some confusion about how this mapping is created.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T02:10:41.631298+00:00