Author: Ethan Heilman 2015-03-23 15:33:18
Published on: 2015-03-23T15:33:18+00:00
The dev list has been discussing the issues of misbehaving peers and attacks on the P2P network. A research paper on partitioning Bitcoind nodes from the rest of the network has been shared to address this concern. The paper titled "Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin's Peer-to-Peer Network" describes how an adversary can control a sufficient number of IP addresses to monopolize all connections to and from a victim bitcoin node, allowing them to exploit the victim for attacks on the mining and consensus system of Bitcoin. The paper uses probabilistic analysis, Monte Carlo simulations, measurements, and experiments with live bitcoin nodes to quantify the resources involved in such an attack. The paper also proposes countermeasures inspired by botnet architectures that are designed to raise the bar for eclipse attacks while preserving the openness and decentralization of Bitcoin's current network architecture. The full paper is available at http://cs-people.bu.edu/heilman/eclipse/.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T18:55:09.397368+00:00