Author: Peter Todd 2015-08-22 01:48:06
Published on: 2015-08-22T01:48:06+00:00
In July 2013, Peter Todd posted a message on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list warning of potential security vulnerabilities related to the Litecoin v0.8.3.6 release. He highlights two major issues: firstly, that Litecoin is vulnerable to a fork and double-spend attack due to the temporary limits on block size and complexity introduced in response to a fork. The measures did not protect against malicious attempts to trigger the fork. He recommends that miners be encouraged to transition to v0.8.3.6 to ensure as much hashing power as possible is consolidated on one version. Secondly, he warned that Bitcoin is quite vulnerable to network-wide DoS attacks due to the maximum connections limits, and Litecoin will make this attack significantly less costly to the attacker in v0.8.3.6 by adding support for bloom filters. This support allows the attacker to reduce their bandwidth consumption to a minimum, making the attack easier to pull off on a wide scale. There is nothing limiting peers from requesting blocks without bloom filters bandwidth which makes it worse. A good first measure would be to assign a service bit to advertise bloom filter support.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T20:45:04.274195+00:00