From: Peter Todd <pete@petertodd•org>
To: Eric Voskuil <eric@voskuil•org>,
Bitcoin Protocol Discussion
<bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP 151
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2016 14:22:02 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20160628182202.GA5519@fedora-21-dvm> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <360EF9B8-A174-41CA-AFDD-2BC2C0B4DECB@voskuil.org>
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On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 06:45:58PM +0200, Eric Voskuil via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > 1) Transaction censorship
> > ISPs, WIFI provider or any other MITM, can holdback/censor unconfirmed
> > transactions. Regardless if you are a miner or a validation/wallet node.
> >
> > 2) Peer censorship
> > MITM can remove or add entries from a "addr" message.
> >
> > 3) Fingerprinting
> > ISPs or any other MITM can intercept/inject fingerprinting relevant
> > messages like "mempool" to analyze the bitcoin network.
>
> Encryption alone cannot protect against a MITM attack in an anonymous and permissionless network. This is accepted in the BIP (and your follow-up reply).
Being able to easily detect MITM attacks is a _huge_ step forward that
shouldn't be underestimated; even if 99% of users aren't in a position to
detect the MITM you only need a small subset of users that do the necessary
checks to alert the wider community, who can then respond with stronger
security measures. Those measures are likely to be more costly - authenticated
systems are significantly harder than not - so better to save your efforts
until the need for them is more obvious.
Also the fact that an attack has a reasonable probability of detection is a big
disincentive for many types of attackers - note how one of the things revealed
in the Snowden leaks was the fact that the NSA generally tries quite hard to
avoid tipping off targets to the fact that they're being surveilled, with a
myriad of carefully scripted policies to control when and how exploits are used
against targets.
--
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2016-06-28 18:22 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 59+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2016-06-28 2:31 [bitcoin-dev] BIP 151 use of HMAC_SHA512 Rusty Russell
2016-06-28 7:17 ` [bitcoin-dev] BIP 151 Eric Voskuil
2016-06-28 8:26 ` Jonas Schnelli
2016-06-28 16:45 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-28 18:22 ` Peter Todd [this message]
2016-06-28 18:35 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-28 20:14 ` Peter Todd
2016-06-28 20:29 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-28 20:36 ` Peter Todd
2016-06-28 21:22 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-28 21:36 ` Gregory Maxwell
2016-06-28 21:40 ` Cameron Garnham
2016-06-28 22:07 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-28 22:33 ` Cameron Garnham
2016-06-28 23:29 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-29 0:06 ` Nick ODell
2016-06-28 21:59 ` Eric Voskuil
[not found] ` <CAAS2fgQ0Ocs8hF+pf+fWfkKKhQwxNKpY=JHpb_bwua7neVO8tg@mail.gmail.com>
2016-06-28 23:34 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-28 20:06 ` Jonas Schnelli
2016-06-28 23:31 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-29 11:17 ` Alfie John
2016-06-30 11:56 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-30 12:20 ` Jonas Schnelli
2016-06-30 12:27 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-30 12:43 ` Jonas Schnelli
2016-06-30 15:22 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-30 16:52 ` Peter Todd
2016-06-30 18:25 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-30 19:06 ` Peter Todd
2016-06-30 20:26 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-28 19:55 ` Gregory Maxwell
2016-06-28 23:33 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-29 1:01 ` Gregory Maxwell
2016-06-30 9:57 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-30 13:03 ` Pieter Wuille
2016-06-30 15:10 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-08-31 14:29 ` Pieter Wuille
2016-06-30 13:36 ` Erik Aronesty
2016-06-30 14:47 ` Alfie John
2016-07-02 9:44 ` Chris Priest
2016-06-28 12:13 ` Jonas Schnelli
2016-06-28 17:39 ` Eric Voskuil
2016-06-28 7:19 ` [bitcoin-dev] BIP 151 use of HMAC_SHA512 Jonas Schnelli
2016-06-28 8:31 ` Arthur Chen
2016-06-29 18:34 ` Jonas Schnelli
2016-06-29 20:13 ` Peter Todd
2016-06-29 20:31 ` Jonas Schnelli
2016-06-29 1:00 ` Rusty Russell
2016-06-29 1:38 ` Arthur Chen
2016-06-29 1:56 ` Ethan Heilman
2016-06-29 6:58 ` Pieter Wuille
2016-06-29 14:38 ` Ethan Heilman
2016-06-29 18:46 ` Jonas Schnelli
2016-07-01 3:25 ` Rusty Russell
2016-07-01 22:42 ` Zooko Wilcox
2016-07-04 1:23 ` Arthur Chen
2016-07-04 1:44 ` Arthur Chen
2016-07-04 6:47 ` Jonas Schnelli
2016-07-04 6:37 ` Jonas Schnelli
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