Author: Peter Todd 2016-06-30 16:52:27
Published on: 2016-06-30T16:52:27+00:00
In a discussion on a Bitcoin developer mailing list, Eric Voskuil expresses concern over the implications of BIP151. The proposal suggests that a peer trusts another is not an attacker for authentication. Jonas Schnelli responds stating that BIP151 would increase the risks for MITM attackers, and questions what benefits there are to Mallory if he can't be sure Alice and Bob may know that he is intercepting the channel. Voskuil acknowledges the mechanics of a tunnel between trusting parties that have a secure side channel, but poses the question of how they maintain the chain when no other peer can connect to these two nodes. He notes that often there are tunnels between trusting nodes, which allows groups of nodes to collaborate, thereby acting as one node from a system security standpoint. However, if people become generally reliant on good node registration, it will become the registrar who controls access to the network. Peter Todd responds to Voskuil's concerns by asking if he is against Bitcoin Core's tor support, which makes use of onion addresses and is self-authenticated in the same way as BIP151 proposes. Todd explains that node-to-node connections over tor are encrypted and that Tor onion support is enabled and automatically setup in recent versions of Tor.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T18:59:51.135321+00:00