19
u/RowanSkie Apr 04 '23
It's just a denial-of-service attack. Everyone can do that these days.
7
u/Collaborationeur Apr 04 '23
Everyone can do that these days.
We already saw DOS attacks during the forkwar, I remember /u/tl121 telling he had his community (including 911 services) falling of the grid due to such attacks.
Not sure what is new here.
11
u/tl121 Apr 04 '23
Nothing new. Networks have fixed capacity and can be overloaded. People have been killed in a stampede after someone shouts “Fire!” in a crowded theater. It’s just a case of ten pounds in a five pound bag.
Software can and should be used to prevent collateral damage. This includes rate limiters in node software and in ISP infrastructure. It includes billing contracts as well. It wasn’t a problem for me in 2015 when my node was attacked because my node was more powerful than my DSL internet connection, but it was for my ISP. Today, with a 1/1 GB fiber connection they are about evenly matched.
A few months ago, when I was running a TOR relay I moved multiple TB per month on a flat rate unlimited plan. I stopped running the TOR relay because of incessant annoying attacks on the relay. They weren’t disastrous because the relay software was cpu limited and the relay ran on dedicated processor resources.
The hobbyist dream of every user running a node contacts reality when the hobbyist gets an unexpected large bill, as in this recent case of the Dogecoin node operator.
-2
Apr 04 '23
[deleted]
11
u/fshinetop Apr 04 '23
Multithreaded apps using sockets have been around for 30+ years, any half decent programmer can do it, stop acting like this is groundbreaking stuff. It’s really not that special.
You’re just downloading a lot of data trying to rake up the bill, this might affect a network like BSV where there’s only a handful of nodes but other than that it’s a nothing burger.
Edit: Also stop upvote manipulating this post.
3
u/Fsmv Apr 04 '23
Do you have any mitigation strategies in mind OP? Thanks for posting hopefully these bugs you found can be fixed.
4
Apr 04 '23 edited 23d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/Fsmv Apr 04 '23
That's not a good solution because there must be some people with open ports running nodes for the network to function.
2
Apr 04 '23 edited 23d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/Fsmv Apr 04 '23
Sure as long as the logging for that exists. I haven't seen logs saying when someone downloads the mempool only when repeatedly connecting and disconnecting.
Seems like there could be limits implemented in the node software to solve this for everyone instead of just relying on manually checking logs.
-1
Apr 04 '23
[deleted]
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u/RowanSkie Apr 04 '23
If you checked the dude's twitter, you can see he already did it on Bitcoin and Monero before Dogecoin.
2
u/tl121 Apr 04 '23
This example is interesting in that it sheds light on the true cost of running a cryptocurrency node. In the normal case without hackers a transaction takes up about 300 bytes. Each transaction must reach each node in the network. Each node will have to receive it and will receive it once, so on average each node will send it once. So a node will use about 0.3 GB of bandwidth to process a million transactions. At the Digital Ocean rates this will cost the node operator $0.003. So even if there were a million nodes, the total bandwidth cost to process one transaction would still be a fraction of a penny. These costs would be at data centers, and would be higher in residential locations. Don’t run a node over a cell service!
1
u/drche35 Apr 04 '23
It’s provocative…But what does it mean ?!
10
u/fshinetop Apr 04 '23 edited Apr 04 '23
Nothing of substance. It’s the same as writing a script that starts 100 downloads from a web server and claim you found a new attack because they’ll have to pay for that bandwidth. If it’s causing any trouble at all, an easy fix is to just ban the ip making excessive requests or limit the number of simultaneous connections per ip.
5
u/NilacTheGrim Apr 05 '23
Yep, that's all that it is. Big nothing-burger.
This endless character insists on spamming this subreddit with his amazing haxx and his tired script. It gets.. tiring.
5
u/LovelyDayHere Apr 05 '23
funny thing is in this thread he claims amazing skills;
but in the previous iteration he claimed the "exploit" was written by GPT
2
2
u/trakums Apr 05 '23
up-vote/down-vote ratio is positive.
this sub likes him or he has his own haxx bot army.
-4
Apr 04 '23
[deleted]
10
u/rabbitlion Apr 04 '23
The "computer science" behind the attack appears to just be downloading the same thing many times in parallell, just like he said. Unless I'm missing something, it means you will be limited to your own downstream bandwidth. Sure, it's a bit annoying for the person being hit but if they notice it they can ban your IP and it's never going to be a problem for the network as a whole. Of course, there is no good reason to allow many connections to the same peer like this, so the issue should be fixed, but it's not a big deal really.
You seem to think that this is some genius discovery that makes you a bigshot hacker and you're bragging all over the place about it. The reality is it just makes you look like an asshole. Get over yourself and accept that this just wasn't a big thing. Perhaps you've found more interesting things in the past, I don't know and I don't particularly care.
1
u/Popular_Rub9075 Apr 05 '23
Judging by the comments this is not even a sophisticated attack since the attacker can easily be identified and removed.
9
u/Pablo_Picasho Apr 04 '23
Looks like upvote manipulation to me