Author: Peter Todd 2013-07-30 18:30:43
Published on: 2013-07-30T18:30:43+00:00
The topic of discussion in this email thread is the use of Tor in Bitcoinj and how to improve it. The concern was that to support Tor, SOCKS would be needed, along with a way to use hidden peers, and an anti-Sybil heuristic. It was noted that by definition of the hidden peers in Tor, there isn't supposed to be any knowledge about them. However, there was a response to these concerns stating that Tor doesn't act as an effective man-in-the-middle for nodes that can connect to hidden services. It was suggested that users should use Tor to preserve their privacy, but not trust zero-conf transactions as they are not secure. It was mentioned that Gregory Maxwell wrote the hidden service support for Bitcoind, and he had the idea of adding .onion addresses of seed nodes alongside DNS seeds table. This would provide an end-to-end MITM-proof channel to a trusted seed who can give an honest view of the network. It was suggested that ideally, those .onion addresses would be nodes run by the same people as running the existing seeds so that it's clear who's being trusted. Bitcoin relays .onion addresses over the P2P network, so once connected, users can gain additional peers with addresses that are MITM resistant. There isn't currently any equivalent to the weak anti-sybil properties of IP address range diversity for .onion's, but in the future, node identities will be added, and some way to make creating lots of fake identities for a sybil attack expensive.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T14:50:32.643553+00:00