[network-health] ASMap Work for Sybil Resistance in Bitcoin Core

[Georg Koppen]

Hi Matt!

Matt Corallo:
> Hey gk@!
> 
> I was directed to send a mail with this to you to make you aware of it
> by a random IRC'izen.

Thanks and sorry for the meeting confusion. It should be better from
next week on once we get used to all the new processes in the network
health world. I am CC'ing the network-health list, so others can chime
in as well.

>> I wanted to point folks to some recent work in bitcoin-land that is
>> likely of particular interest to tor folks: we've begun work to
>> consider the asn which announces a given ip block in our peer
>> selection algorithm in order to bolster our sybil-resistance, and have
>> a relatively-efficient file format to be able to ship the global
>> routing table with our binaries (eventually).... if you're interested,
>> check out https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/16599 (and the
>> academic work on Bitcoin sybil resistance at
>> https://erebus-attack.comp.nus.edu.sg/ ).
>> as well as the encoder for said encoding at https://github.com/sipa/asmap
> 
> Happy to get the right folks to join Tor-Network-Health meetings or so
> if there's room to collaborate given the highly overlapping problem sets
> here.

Skimming the paper I think Tor has already included a solution to this
problem a while back: It's the "Whitelisting IP addresses"-approach in
VII A. 3) in the paper, which is not a desirable solution for Bitcoin it
seems.

In particular, the Tor client is not considering any node which is
saying "Hey, I am a Tor node!" when it decides to build a path through
the network, but rather only those nodes the directory authorities have
consensus over. They are essentially the ones who get to decide which
relays count as Tor relays for which purpose (like an exit relay) and
which not, and anyone else uses that consensus (i.e. whitelist) for
path-building. In the Tor context there are no "shadow IPs" which the
attacker can flood a victim node with to get traffic re-routed.

Does that make sense? If not, I am happy to see how you think the Erebus
attack is important for the Tor network. (Don't get me wrong. Tor is not
immune to sybil attacks. It just seems to me that the Erebus version is
not one we need to worry about.)

Georg

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