[Bitcoin-development] Policy for DNS seeds
We've established a few basic rules for the DNS seeds as used in the Bitcoin Core software. See below. If you run one of the DNS seeds please reply to this and let us know whether you agree to these terms. if you think some requirements are unreasonable let us know too. If we haven't heard from you by 2014-08-04 we will remove your DNS seed from the list of defaults. Expectations for DNSSeed operators Bitcoin Core attempts to minimize the level of trust in DNS seeds, but DNS seeds still pose a small amount of risk for the network. Other implementations of Bitcoin software may also use the same seeds and may be more exposed. In light of this exposure this document establishes some basic expectations for the expectations for the operation of dnsseeds. 0. A DNSseed operating organization or person is expected to follow good host security practices and maintain control of their serving infrastructure and not sell or transfer control of their infrastructure. Any hosting services contracted by the operator are equally expected to uphold these expectations. 1. The DNSseed results must consist exclusively of fairly selected and functioning Bitcoin nodes from the public network to the best of the operators understanding and capability. 2. For the avoidance of doubt, the results may be randomized but must not single-out any group of hosts to receive different results unless due to an urgent technical necessity and disclosed. 3. The results may not be served with a DNS TTL of less than one minute. 4. Any logging of DNS queries should be only that which is necessary for the operation of the service or urgent health of the Bitcoin network and must not be retained longer than necessary or disclosed to any third party. 5. Information gathered as a result of the operators node-spidering (not from DNS queries) may be freely published or retained, but only if this data was not made more complete by biasing node connectivity (a violation of expectation (1)). 6. Operators are encouraged, but not required, to publicly document the details of their operating practices. 7. A reachable email contact address must be published for inquiries related to the DNSseed operation. If these expectations cannot be satisfied the operator should discontinue providing services and contact the active Bitcoin Core development team as well as posting on bitcoin-development. Behavior outside of these expectations may be reasonable in some situations but should be discussed in public in advance. See https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/4566 Wladimir -- Want fast and easy access to all the code in your enterprise? Index and search up to 200,000 lines of code with a free copy of Black Duck Code Sight - the same software that powers the world's largest code search on Ohloh, the Black Duck Open Hub! Try it now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bds ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Policy for DNS seeds
How about research projects into node distribution? Specifically I wonder whether the collection and analysis of DNS query origin is allowed when queries are anonymized and aggregated. This would prevent the identification of a single user, which I assume is the rationale for point 4. Other than that I'm perfectly fine with accepting the rules for seed.bitcoinstats.com Regards, Christian -- Christian Decker On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 2:43 PM, Wladimir laa...@gmail.com wrote: We've established a few basic rules for the DNS seeds as used in the Bitcoin Core software. See below. If you run one of the DNS seeds please reply to this and let us know whether you agree to these terms. if you think some requirements are unreasonable let us know too. If we haven't heard from you by 2014-08-04 we will remove your DNS seed from the list of defaults. Expectations for DNSSeed operators Bitcoin Core attempts to minimize the level of trust in DNS seeds, but DNS seeds still pose a small amount of risk for the network. Other implementations of Bitcoin software may also use the same seeds and may be more exposed. In light of this exposure this document establishes some basic expectations for the expectations for the operation of dnsseeds. 0. A DNSseed operating organization or person is expected to follow good host security practices and maintain control of their serving infrastructure and not sell or transfer control of their infrastructure. Any hosting services contracted by the operator are equally expected to uphold these expectations. 1. The DNSseed results must consist exclusively of fairly selected and functioning Bitcoin nodes from the public network to the best of the operators understanding and capability. 2. For the avoidance of doubt, the results may be randomized but must not single-out any group of hosts to receive different results unless due to an urgent technical necessity and disclosed. 3. The results may not be served with a DNS TTL of less than one minute. 4. Any logging of DNS queries should be only that which is necessary for the operation of the service or urgent health of the Bitcoin network and must not be retained longer than necessary or disclosed to any third party. 5. Information gathered as a result of the operators node-spidering (not from DNS queries) may be freely published or retained, but only if this data was not made more complete by biasing node connectivity (a violation of expectation (1)). 6. Operators are encouraged, but not required, to publicly document the details of their operating practices. 7. A reachable email contact address must be published for inquiries related to the DNSseed operation. If these expectations cannot be satisfied the operator should discontinue providing services and contact the active Bitcoin Core development team as well as posting on bitcoin-development. Behavior outside of these expectations may be reasonable in some situations but should be discussed in public in advance. See https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/4566 Wladimir -- Want fast and easy access to all the code in your enterprise? Index and search up to 200,000 lines of code with a free copy of Black Duck Code Sight - the same software that powers the world's largest code search on Ohloh, the Black Duck Open Hub! Try it now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bds ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
[Bitcoin-development] Question on creating test cases for block.CheckBlock()
I'm working on a BIP which needs to modify the block acceptance rules. I have two ways of testing: - Mining blocks on the testnet - Creating test cases for Bitcoin Core. I want to create those test cases for block.CheckBlock(), which involves verifying 100 dynamically generated blocks. What is the state of the blockchain when a test case is executed ? Is is configured for the regtest, testnet3 or mainnet? What blocks are in the blockchain? Only the genesis block? checkblock_tests.cpp seems to be the only test case for CheckBlock() and it assumes the mainnet is configured. I need to use the regtest so I can create blocks of difficulty 1. Best regards and thank you in advance, -- Want fast and easy access to all the code in your enterprise? Index and search up to 200,000 lines of code with a free copy of Black Duck Code Sight - the same software that powers the world's largest code search on Ohloh, the Black Duck Open Hub! Try it now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bds ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Policy for DNS seeds
On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 12:24 PM, Peter Todd p...@petertodd.org wrote: Might be worthwhile to also write an Expectations for DNSSeed users outlining what security properties the seeds actually have, and what kind of attacks are possible. Agreed. I've seen some amount of use of dnsseeds which I would consider inadvisable considering their weakness. Many users would be better served with seeds that offer authenticated and encrypted connections to the seeds for instance. (esp. if they're using authed/encrypted connections to nodes, e.g. Tor hidden services) Also agreed, we ought to have a separate onionseed process for hosts which can reach hidden services which would be inherently authenticated and somewhat more anonymous. The existing introduction method already doesn't work well for onlynet=onion hosts, so that would be a good place to start. 1. The DNSseed results must consist exclusively of fairly selected and functioning Bitcoin nodes from the public network to the best of the operators understanding and capability. Along the lines of my above point, for Bitcoin Core users of the DNSSeeds what constitutes a functioning Bitcoin node is much more broad than what other users might need. I was deliberately vague here in that I'm trying to avoid foreclosing reasonable activities like omitting nodes which are uselessly slow, diverged from the network, or running very old software. The test I'm suggesting is that if why am I doing this is to connect users to functioning nodes then it's probably okay, but if its to achieve some other end— probably not. Note that singling out a group of hosts to receive different results with DNS is especially difficult as you'll be usually singling out different ISP's rather than hosts themselves. That said if we ever start operating HTTPS or similar seeds this expectation will become even more relevant for them. Yes, this is one of the reasons we use DNS (and also one of the reasons the document suggests a non-zero minimum ttl)... but belt and suspenders, even though technical measures are protective here it's good to make it clear that this isn't acceptable. While there have been suggestions to use the testnet seeds for testing vulnerabilities, the public discussion clause should suffice to allow those exceptions. Yep. That was the intent. (well not testnet, but the notion that if there really were a good reason to do something else a discussion should cover it) -- Want fast and easy access to all the code in your enterprise? Index and search up to 200,000 lines of code with a free copy of Black Duck Code Sight - the same software that powers the world's largest code search on Ohloh, the Black Duck Open Hub! Try it now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bds ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
