Author: Pieter Wuille 2016-08-31 14:29:53
Published on: 2016-08-31T14:29:53+00:00
Pieter Wuille and Eric Voskuil have a discussion on the proliferation of node identity, which relates to privacy and network security. Wuille believes that although it is a reasonable concern, node identity is already being used widely in various ways including lists of good nodes, running multiple nodes in different geographic locations and connecting to well-behaving nodes. He also suggests that there is no reason why the P2P network consists of purely servers and clients as it seems strange that such a client would use a 'client protocol' for initial connections but the P2P protocol for syncing with history, when both come from the same peers and transmit the same kind of information. He proposes a protocol split between historical block download, block synchronization at the tip, and transaction relay. Wuille believes that opportunistic encryption should always be used to increase transaction source privacy and (2) and (3) need authentication when one of the peers is not fully validating. BIP 150/151 give the tools to construct these. Although Voskuil agrees that encryption and authentication are straightforward, he doubts that this proposal will have much impact on an advanced persistent threat. He also believes that preventing bad nodes from participating in an anonymous distributed system is a very hard problem, if not impossible, but adding optional and non-discoverable cryptographic identities can improve the current situation as people are already relying on node identity in unclear attack vectors.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T23:33:51.081216+00:00