by cedarctic

Summary

This post contains a collection of my findings on an attacker being able to eclipse Bitcoin nodes using interception attacks - a stealthier variant of the standard BGP hijack.

Key takeaways: The attack seems to be feasible against many nodes in the network, and I was able to produce a proof-of-concept by attacking my own mainnet node in an isolated environment. To hinder this type of attack, I looked into several mitigations, some of which use networking data that the node can observe independently.

The rest of the post presents the attack in detail, looks into its feasibility, presents findings from a proof-of-concept implementation, discusses networking data that can be used in defenses, and concludes with a description of the proposed mitigations.

...read more at delvingbitcoin.org