Author: Michael Hendricks 2012-01-31 15:07:16
Published on: 2012-01-31T15:07:16+00:00
In an email conversation between Gregory Maxwell and Michael Hendricks, the topic of Sybil attacks was brought up. Michael suggested that a Sybil attack would succeed 1.7% of the time if a client had eight connections to the network, but Gregory cautioned against mixing up issues related to the number of connections versus the number of nodes created by address manager. He pointed out that even without address manager, someone who can spin up a large number of nodes as TCP forwarders to a system they control can capture all of a node's outbound connections.Michael then clarified that with the new address manager, his nodes' old address database, which used to have 120k addresses, would now only have 20k addresses, making it easier to fill with evil nodes. However, he still believed that the new address manager was a valuable improvement and should be included in the next release.Finally, Michael noted that while the current ratio of non-listening to listening nodes is 5:1, there is room to allow more outbound connections in some circumstances.
Updated on: 2023-06-05T02:13:49.065181+00:00