Author: Michael Hendricks 2012-01-31 04:33:02
Published on: 2012-01-31T04:33:02+00:00
In a conversation between Gavin Andresen and Michael, they discussed the possibility of a successful Sybil attack. They agreed that the randomness in Pieter's design makes it difficult for an attacker to carry out a finely crafted attack; however, brute force attacks could still be successful. If 60% of the network's nodes were controlled by an evil botnet, a Sybil attack would succeed 1.7% of the time. Nodes that accept incoming connections are far less vulnerable since the probability of success decreases exponentially with the number of connections. To decrease susceptibility to Sybil attacks, they proposed adding a command-line option for increasing the maximum number of outbound connections. They also discussed removing the IRC bootstrapping mechanism to eliminate the tagging of Bitcoin as malware by various ISPs. Michael suggested disabling it by default one release after the new address manager is released. Gavin wondered whether blocking IRC traffic filters some botnets out of the IRC bootstrapping channels, keeping them more "pure".
Updated on: 2023-06-05T02:11:28.011526+00:00