[Bitcoin-development] DOS-Attacks on bitcoin-client?

Scott Howard showard314 at gmail.com
Sun Apr 7 15:22:32 UTC 2013


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




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