Author: Gavin Andresen 2015-07-24 20:59:40
Published on: 2015-07-24T20:59:40+00:00
Gavin Andresen, a Bitcoin developer, has proposed replacing the existing signature operation counting consensus rules in order to mitigate potential CPU exhaustion denial-of-service attacks. The new rules would limit the maximum number of ECDSA signature verifications done per block and the number of bytes hashed to compute signature hashes. The maximum number of ECDSA verify operations required to validate all of the transactions in a block must be less than or equal to the maximum block size in bytes divided by 100 (rounded down), while the maximum number of bytes hashed to compute ECDSA signatures for all transactions in a block must be less than or equal to the maximum block size in bytes times 160. The change is compatible with existing transaction-creation software as transactions larger than 100,000 bytes have been considered "non-standard" for years. However, software that assembles transactions into blocks and validates them must be updated to enforce the new consensus rules. The proposal is intended to be an extra "belt and suspenders" measure to mitigate any possible attack that involves creating and broadcasting a very expensive-to-verify block.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T03:02:14.883902+00:00