Author: Braydon Fuller 2019-10-04 00:38:36
Published on: 2019-10-04T00:38:36+00:00
A paper titled "Bitcoin Chain Width Expansion Denial-of-Service Attacks" has been shared for discussion. The attacks described in the paper use unprotected resources to initiate a denial-of-service attack, causing the node to stop functioning by filling the disk and exhausting the CPU with unnecessary header and block data. The difficulty of these attacks ranges from difficult to easy and there are currently limited guards in place that require checkpoints to be enabled. The paper provides a solution that does not rely on enabling or maintaining checkpoints and offers improved security. As Bitcoin Core's checkpoints have not been updated since mid-2014, this is particularly relevant. Bitcoin Core has implemented headers-first synchronization since 2014, which serves as the base for further improvements. The paper can be accessed at https://bcoin.io/papers/bitcoin-chain-expansion.pdf while the proposed solution has already been implemented in Bcoin and can be found at https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin/tree/chain-expansion.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T21:47:31.808455+00:00