Hear To This Episode:
Bitcoin was beneath assault! It’s the story the mainstream media received’t let you know!
Hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost lastly met in Utrecht once more to report “Bitcoin, Defined.” On this episode, they mentioned a current assault on the Bitcoin community, the place some nodes had been flooding friends with pretend IP addresses.
“These random people who had been connecting to them would ship 500 messages, and every of these 500 messages would include 10 addresses, that had been alleged to characterize different nodes on the community,” Provoost stated. “The messages had been actual, however the content material was nonsense. So, a node would hook up with you, and they might ship you a bunch of addresses, nevertheless it seems these addresses had been only a bunch of random numbers.”
As beforehand mentioned in episode 13, Bitcoin nodes are hook up with friends on the community by means of IP addresses, which they study from their present friends. Nodes on the community basically share the IP addresses of different nodes.
Lately, nonetheless, some Bitcoin nodes shared giant quantities of IP addresses that weren’t related to actual Bitcoin nodes in any respect. Whereas this assault didn’t do very a lot harm, it did waste sources from nodes on the community. On prime of that, van Wirdum and Provoost defined, the assault may provide the attacker perception into Bitcoin’s community topology by analyzing how the pretend IP addresses unfold by means of the community.
Lastly, van Wirdum and Provoost mentioned how the assault was solved by price limiting the quantity of shared IP addresses that any node will permit its friends to obtain. Additional, they thought of how in free and open-source software program improvement, fixing issues is just not all the time as simple as it might appear.
