Author: Antoine Riard 2019-12-16 20:12:12
Published on: 2019-12-16T20:12:12+00:00
The discussion is focused on the detection of a possible attack on the Bitcoin network. The attack strategy involves the eclipse attack and transaction censorship with plausible block delays. The post suggests that such attacks can be easily detected by comparing the time of the latest block header to real time. In the normal case, Alice's chaintip is old but she's still successfully downloading blocks, while in the pathological case, Alice's chaintip is old and she's unable to obtain more recent blocks. It is suggested that an emergency action should be taken if the difference between the two cases is too large. However, implementing an alarm at the validation level is not reliable due to IBD and slowing block announcement could pin one indefinitely in IBD. An alarm implemented at the net_processing level is tricky and may have bad side effects on connectivity. It is further suggested that a reliable detection mechanism is needed because if it's cheaply triggered, there are DoS attack vectors on the LN layer, like delaying blocks knowing it's going to trigger the alarm and than a LN processing node will close its channels. Scoping the issue beyond "something is wrong" is important, and fetching headers thanks to some redundant communication channel seems to be better. The post also talks about the combination of commitment/penalty transaction censorship with plausible block delays as a possible optimal attack strategy.
Updated on: 2023-06-02T22:09:53.817423+00:00