Bitcoin, Explained — The Technical Side of Bitcoin

Bitcoin Eclipse Attacks And How To Stop Them - NADO 17

In this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors discuss Eclipse attacks. More specifically, they discuss the 2015 paper “Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network,” written by Ethan Heilman, Alison K...

2020-11-13

Episode notes

In this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors discuss Eclipse attacks. More specifically, they discuss the 2015 paper “Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network,” written by Ethan Heilman, Alison Kendler, Aviv Zohar and Sharon Goldberg, from Boston University and Hebrew University/MSR Israel.


Chapters


00:00:00 The eclipse-attack research paper

00:01:57 What is an eclipse attack?

00:03:22 Double spending against an isolated node

00:05:54 Splitting miners to amplify the attack

00:08:08 Poisoning peer addresses and connection buckets

00:11:43 Crashes, restarts and capturing connections

00:13:05 Address-selection defenses and feeler connections

00:15:10 Remembering peers across restarts

00:16:26 More outbound peers and block-only connections

00:18:10 Satellites, hidden nodes and remaining defenses


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Music:

Song Title: Segwit Sounds

By: The NakamoTones

Album: Citadel Music

Produced by: Bitcoin Audio