Author: Adam Back 2013-05-06 18:04:18
Published on: 2013-05-06T18:04:18+00:00
The primary vulnerability of Bitcoin, according to a post by Adam Back on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list, is network attacks that can induce network splits, local lower difficulty to a point where a local and artificially isolated area of the network can be fooled into accepting an orphan branch as the one-true block chain. To protect against it, discovering peers through as many network routes and steganographic protocols as possible is necessary. For instance, a popular web server (like Apache) could put a steganographic peer discovery relay from its own network area, even for a small bitcoin fee, to help. In that way, an attacker cannot control the network without denying service to popular SSL sites or having at his disposal an SSL sub-CA cert. Furthermore, Back suggests that users should treat sudden dramatic changes in luck (deviations from 10min interval) as suspicious if their local clock is under their control with unauthenticated NTP. However, due to the first past the post nature of the bitcoin lottery, reduced variance hashcash cannot be used, so it's hard to infer too much even from quite significant luck changes. Adam also discussed the security considerations required to secure Zero-Knowledge systems freedom network and how it has some similarities with Bitcoin p2p seeding requirements. He proposed fixing the exit node issue with an apache mod so that the freedom aip tunnel can terminate right on the website. He further suggested that any site that accepts Bitcoin payment would be happy to run such a mod-Bitcoin.Back noted that Tor has a similar bootstrap problem to Bitcoin. While it may help, it is also passing the buck, not necessarily solving the problem. Additionally, given the vulnerability of DNS to poisoning, he would not trust it too much. He also mentions that off-topic for this discussion, but in the future, node-to-node communication should be encrypted and signed.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T16:07:18.313060+00:00