Hello all, wanting to move to IPv6 support in the Satoshi bitcoin client somewhere in the future, the way IP addresses were managed is not really possible anymore. Right now, basically all addresses ever seen are kept - both on-disk and in-memory, and sorted on last-seen time with some randomization. For some people this lead to multi-megabyte addr.dat files that took ages (well, seconds) to load.
After some discussion with Gregory Maxwell and others on IRC, I decided to write a specialized address manager based on an entirely different principle: only keep a limited number of addresses, keep and index them in-memory, and only occasionally (and asynchronously) dump them to disk. This of course leads to a weakness: attackers may try to poison your entire address cache with addresses they control, in order to perform a Sybil attack. This is especially dangerous in the context of IPv6, where much more possible addresses exist. To protect against this, we came up with this design: keep two tables: one that keeps addresses we've had actual connections with, and one that maintains untried/new addresses. Both are separated into several limited-size buckets. Each tables provides a level of protection against sybil attacks: * Addresses in the first table are placed in one of only a few buckets chosen based on the address range (/16 for IPv4). This way, an attacker cannot have tons of active nodes in the same /16 range, and use those to fill the table. * Addresses in the second table are placed in one of a few buckets chosen based on address range the information came from, instead of the address itself. This way, an attacker spamming you with tons of "addr" messages can only still have a limited effect. * All crucial decisions (selection of addresses, picking a place in a bucket, which entry to evict if necessary, ...) are randomized with biases to improve efficiency. Selection of buckets is based on a cryptographic hash using a secret key to deterministically randomize behaviour. The implementation is available in pull request 787 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/787), but there is certainly need for testing, and room for improvements. Test reports, comments, constructive criticism, suggestions and improvements are very welcome. -- Pieter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try before you buy = See our experts in action! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-dev2 _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
