Author: Gregory Maxwell 2015-05-12 20:02:36
Published on: 2015-05-12T20:02:36+00:00
In an email thread from May 2015, Jeff Garzik discussed the problem of security being weakened when an attacker can DoS a small part of the chain by DoS'ing a small number of nodes, causing a network-wide DoS because nobody can complete a sync. A suggestion was made to think of that attack as a bandwidth exhaustion DOS attack on the archive nodes. The question was then raised as to whether the option would make some nodes that would have been archive not be, and it was suspected that this might happen, but not to the extent that it would offset the gain of additional copies of the data when those attacks are not going on. It was suggested that it is useful to give people incremental ways to participate even when they can't swallow the whole pill or choose to provide the resource that's cheap for them to provide. If there are only two kinds of full nodes--archive and pruned--then the archive nodes take both a huge disk and bandwidth cost; whereas if there are fractional nodes, then archives take low(er) bandwidth unless the fractionals get DOS attacked. The discussion highlights the importance of considering different ways to maintain security and participation in the network.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T20:21:17.381644+00:00