Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] [bitcoin] Add rotation of outbound connections (#4723)

From: Ivan Pustogarov <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 11:34:40 +0200

I agree with this.
Some combinatorics shows that 3 persistent connections instead of 8 results in
a low success rate of the entry-peers fingerprinting attack.

> it should not disconnect any nodes which were addnode, and it should not disconnect whitelisted peers
I agree ('Addnodes' are already excluded in the example code from the pull request)

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 04:51:34PM -0700, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> It was pointed out to me that my concern wrt partitioning is unclear. Imagine
> an attacker starts up a moderate number of sybil nodes. He also connects to
> every other available listening peer and fills up their inbound capacity.
> 
> In the current network this kind of activity would only disrupt newly joining
> peers. But nodes which were still online would remain connected to each other.
> With excessive rotation the entire network could become connected exclusively
> via the sybils.
> 
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.*
> 

-- 
Ivan