Author: Gregory Maxwell 2011-09-15 14:21:44
Published on: 2011-09-15T14:21:44+00:00
In a discussion about how to handle potential denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, Gavin Andresen advocates for failing hard and logging the reason locally. He believes that response messages would only give attackers another potential attack vector and that debug logs make it clear what triggers a ban. However, he supports the imposition of transaction rules so that dropping is not pointless due to the possibility of junk transactions being used in an attack. Andresen suggests that nodes should only drop transactions that would invalidate a block if included in it, but this raises issues with double spends. He proposes a solution where nodes should not forward any transaction until they are current with their last checkpoint. This reduces exposure to new nodes getting hit with double spends that they are yet too inexperienced to reject, which prolongs their period of ignorance. When asked whether there should be tolerance for sending garbage data, Andrésen says that it would be fine to hang up on any garbage data because something is obviously wrong. However, he would be hesitant to ban on a single instance of it since it is rare but does happen. Overall, the discussion highlights the importance of carefully considering the impact of network rules and avoiding hanging up on nodes that may simply be too young to know better.
Updated on: 2023-05-18T22:20:08.590550+00:00