<oembed><type>rich</type><version>1.0</version><author_name>Braydon Fuller [ARCHIVE] (npub1fx…xxtaa)</author_name><author_url>https://nostr.ae/npub1fx2eyw7avet7dut0slazcehwvrrlhjp2u9jc9zd92l7nexpxeahs4xxtaa</author_url><provider_name>njump</provider_name><provider_url>https://nostr.ae</provider_url><html>📅 Original date posted:2019-10-03&#xA;📝 Original message:Hi everyone,&#xA;&#xA;We would like to share a paper for broad discussion, it is titled&#xA;&#34;Bitcoin Chain Width Expansion Denial-of-Service Attacks&#34;.&#xA;&#xA;&gt;From the abstract: The attacks leverage unprotected resources for a&#xA;denial-of-service by filling the disk and exhausting the CPU with&#xA;unnecessary header and block data. This forces the node to halt&#xA;operation. The attack difficulty ranges from difficult to easy. There&#xA;are currently limited guards for some of the attacks that require&#xA;checkpoints to be enabled. This paper describes a solution that does not&#xA;require enabling or maintaining checkpoints and provides improved security.&#xA;&#xA;As the checkpoints in Bitcoin Core have not been maintained or updated&#xA;since mid 2014, this is especially relevant. Bitcoin Core implements&#xA;headers-first synchronization, since 2014, that provides the base for&#xA;the further improvements upon that design.&#xA;&#xA;The paper is available at:&#xA;https://bcoin.io/papers/bitcoin-chain-expansion.pdf&#xA;&#xA;The proposed solution has been implemented in Bcoin and is available at:&#xA;https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin/tree/chain-expansion&#xA;&#xA;Best,&#xA;Braydon Fuller</html></oembed>