Foundations of Blockchain

Eclipsing the node

A Bitcoin node can have a maximum of 8 outgoing and 117 incoming connections. Since there's a limit on the number of outgoing connections, the attacker can force the victim to solely establish connections to malicious nodes created by the attacker:

Figure 10.7: Bitcoin node with outgoing and incoming connections in a peer-to-peer network

This may look easy in theory; however, forcing the victim to only create connections to malicious nodes requires more than a single-step attack. The attacker has to learn and manipulate the victim's connection information to manipulate the user's outgoing connections. Bitcoin nodes store ...