DARPA study challenges assumptions about distributed ledger security

Re:DARPA study challenges assumptions about distributed ledg... by SkyMarshal on Wednesday June 22, 2022 @12:00PM (#31837772)

I think there’s nothing new here the Bitcoin engineering community isn’t already aware of and working on, but probably still useful to compile it all in one document.

TLDR (of the article, not the full report [1]):

1. Cryptographic primitives are sound

2. Implementation details and network topography may not be

3. 21% of Bitcoin nodes running an older version with a known vulnerability (patched in latest version)

4. Bitcoin network traffic is unencrypted, can be eavesdropped

5. Of all Bitcoin traffic, 60 percent traverses just three ISPs

6. Vast majority of Bitcoin nodes do not mine, nor communicate directly with miners

7. Four Bitcoin mining pools constitute over 51% of the hashpower

8. Their mining nodes do not connect directly to the network, but rather connect through gateways, representing single points of failure

[1]: https://assets-global.website-files.com/5fd11235b3950c2c1a3b...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:DARPA study challenges assumptions about distributed ledg... by semidetached on Wednesday June 22, 2022 @03:25PM (#31840669)

9. "there is no known way to create any permissionless blockchain that is impervious to malicious nodes without having a trusted-third party"

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:DARPA study challenges assumptions about distributed ledg... by SkyMarshal on Monday June 27, 2022 @11:55AM (#31896360)

Well, impervious to over 1/3rd of nodes being malicious, at least.

[ Parent | on HN ]