Author: Peter Todd 2013-05-06 16:37:32
Published on: 2013-05-06T16:37:32+00:00
In this email thread, Jeff Garzik discusses the security of DNS seeds in Bitcoinj, a Java implementation of the Bitcoin protocol. He argues that security will remain the same as long as one server/seed is honest and suggests that existing DNS seeds should select peers from a wider pool to reduce the amount of effort required by those running the seeds. However, he acknowledges that DNS returns unsigned data usually and an alternative seed system with SSL certs could provide a way of getting results from the seed to users initially. Garzik also notes that Bitcoinj has been over-reliant on DNS seeds and needs fixing. He suggests that node-to-node communication should be encrypted and signed, and seeds should have a mechanism to return the pubkey the node will use for communication. This would protect against ISP MITM attacking communications with every node. Finally, he mentions that Tor hidden service nodes already do this essentially.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T16:06:18.377709+00:00