Re: [Bitcoin-development] Miners MiTM

[Pedro Worcel <pedro@worcel.com>]

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> the only protection is SSL + certificate validation on client side.
However certificate revocation and updates in miners are pain in the ass,
that's why majority of pools (mine including) don't want to play with
that...

Another solution which would have less overhead would be to implement
something akin to what openssh does. The OpenSSH client stores a
certificate fingerprint, which is then verified automatically upon further
connections to the server.

The initial connection needs to be verified manually by the operator,
though.

> Certificate validation isn't needed unless the attacker can do a direct
MITM
at connection time, which is a lot harder to maintain than injecting a
client.reconnect. This, combined with your concern about up to date
certs/revokes/etc, is why BFGMiner defaults to TLS without cert checking for
stratum.

Seems to me that it would correctly mitigate the attack mentioned in the
wired article. I am surprised that miners are not worried about losing
their profits, I would personally be quite annoyed.



2014-08-08 12:37 GMT+12:00 Christopher Franko <chrisjfranko@gmail.com>:

> What exactly makes bitcoin less of a target than a "scamcoin" which I
> suspect means anything that != bitcoin?
>
>
> On 7 August 2014 20:29, slush <slush@centrum.cz> wrote:
>
>> AFAIK the only protection is SSL + certificate validation on client side.
>> However certificate revocation and updates in miners are pain in the ass,
>> that's why majority of pools (mine including) don't want to play with
>> that...
>>
>> slush
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 1:45 AM, Luke Dashjr <luke@dashjr.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thursday, August 07, 2014 11:02:21 PM Pedro Worcel wrote:
>>> > Hi there,
>>> >
>>> > I was wondering if you guys have come across this article:
>>> >
>>> > http://www.wired.com/2014/08/isp-bitcoin-theft/
>>> >
>>> > The TL;DR is that somebody is abusing the BGP protocol to be in a
>>> position
>>> > where they can intercept the miner traffic. The concerning point is
>>> that
>>> > they seem to be having some degree of success in their endeavour and
>>> > earning profits from it.
>>> >
>>> > I do not understand the impact of this (I don't know much about BGP,
>>> the
>>> > mining protocol nor anything else, really), but I thought it might be
>>> worth
>>> > putting it up here.
>>>
>>> This is old news; both BFGMiner and Eloipool were hardened against it a
>>> long
>>> time ago (although no Bitcoin pools have deployed it so far). I'm not
>>> aware of
>>> any actual case of it being used against Bitcoin, though - the target has
>>> always been scamcoins.
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
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>
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