DOS-Attacks on bitcoin-client?

4 messages, 7 to 8 Apr 2013. Started by Oliver Egginger.

Oliver Egginger (2), Scott Howard, Jeff Garzik

Security disclosures and vulnerabilities

Oliver Egginger 7 Apr 2013, 14:43 UTC permalink original

Hello,

I'm using your bitcoin-qt client (version 0.8.1). Normally everything is working pretty fine, but sometimes it seems that other nodes produce an enormous amount of traffic. I have not had the time to investigate thoroughly yet. I only have briefly viewed with tshark.

So far I have just restarted the client in the hope that it no longer connects with the 'evil' node. This usually works quite well.

Is anything about DOS-Attacks known to you?

regards Oliver

Scott Howard 7 Apr 2013, 15:22 UTC in reply to Oliver Egginger permalink original

On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 10:43 AM, Oliver Egginger <bitcoin@olivere•de> wrote:

Quoted text (11 lines)

> Hello,
>
> I'm using your bitcoin-qt client (version 0.8.1). Normally everything is
> working pretty fine, but sometimes it seems that other nodes produce an
> enormous amount of traffic. I have not had the time to investigate
> thoroughly yet. I only have briefly viewed with tshark.
>
> So far I have just restarted the client in the hope that it no longer
> connects with the 'evil' node. This usually works quite well.
>
> Is anything about DOS-Attacks known to you?

Many new users have started using the reference client which downloads the whole blockchain from peers. There currently isn't a throttling mechanism [1] so it's possible to quickly eat up your bandwidth. You can try QoS on your router or use the -nolisten command line flag. You will still relay transactions, just not serve the whole blockchain.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/273

Oliver Egginger 7 Apr 2013, 16:35 UTC in reply to Scott Howard permalink original

Am 07.04.2013 17:22, schrieb Scott Howard:

Quoted text (2 lines)

> Many new users have started using the reference client which downloads
> the whole blockchain from peers.

Yes I have made a clean start because of the the new database structure.

Quoted text (4 lines)

> There currently isn't a throttling
> mechanism [1] so it's possible to quickly eat up your bandwidth. You
> can try QoS on your router or use the -nolisten command line flag. You
> will still relay transactions, just not serve the whole blockchain.

I see. I successfully have downloaded the Blockchain again. Thus, it should not occur again now. If it does, I'll be back again. :-)

Thank you for your quick help.

regards Oliver

Jeff Garzik 8 Apr 2013, 05:42 UTC in reply to Oliver Egginger permalink original

BTW, check out the blockchain torrent, as one way of offloading some of the download bandwidth used from the P2P network:

     Bitcoin blockchain data torrent
     https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0