Hi everyone, We would like to share a paper for broad discussion, it is titled "Bitcoin Chain Width Expansion Denial-of-Service Attacks".
>From the abstract: The attacks leverage unprotected resources for a denial-of-service by filling the disk and exhausting the CPU with unnecessary header and block data. This forces the node to halt operation. The attack difficulty ranges from difficult to easy. There are currently limited guards for some of the attacks that require checkpoints to be enabled. This paper describes a solution that does not require enabling or maintaining checkpoints and provides improved security. As the checkpoints in Bitcoin Core have not been maintained or updated since mid 2014, this is especially relevant. Bitcoin Core implements headers-first synchronization, since 2014, that provides the base for the further improvements upon that design. The paper is available at: https://bcoin.io/papers/bitcoin-chain-expansion.pdf The proposed solution has been implemented in Bcoin and is available at: https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin/tree/chain-expansion Best, Braydon Fuller _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
