Post
Topic
Board Pools
Re: [6600 TH] BTC Guild - Pays TxFees+NMC, Stratum, VarDiff, Private Servers
by
AussieHash
on 06/04/2014, 18:09:37 UTC
I wonder how much of this bad luck turn is due to external influences?

Somebody is DDOS eligius, and recently succeeded in a NMC payout hack against the pool. I also have noticed BTCGuild, Ghash and Blockchain showing the cloud flare error in the past few days.

A semi-well known fact about me:  my real life job includes DDoS mitigation at the ISP level for multiple ISPs.

This particular attack against Eligius has taken almost every form possible... UDP reflection attacks (DNS, NTP, SNMP, etc... 30+ gigabit at times), TCP SYN attacks (over 20 gigabit peaks), botnets directly flooding pool ports (multiple gigabit), botnets attempting application layer (stratum and HTTP) attacks (varies up to several gigabit and > 100k connections), HTTP request floods from botnets and other amplification (wordpress being one), hanging TCP connection attacks, various attack attempts against public facing bitcoinds, flood attacks against upstream routers, social engineering attempts (someone has contacted the abuse@ addresses for some nodes claiming Eligius is DoS attacking them, lol, presumably in an attempt to stir trouble with our hosts), and probably a ton of other things that are just automatically filtered/ignored.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=441465.msg5986935#msg5986935

Luck for eligius and BTCGuild are both well under 100%
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=441465.msg6077549#msg6077549

Unknown pool is rapidly growing share, up to 33 34%
http://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=48hrs

And there maybe an unknown binary Merkle tree weakness being used (where the included transaction count are base 2). Now even if the weakness is theoretical, this is severely delaying confirmation times.

https://blockchain.info/blocks/80.241.217.46
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/22cohy/8024121746_mining_18_blocks_today_containing/
http://reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20y0nq/why_do_all_the_blocks_hashed_by_unknown_miners/

Would a faster-to-calculate power of 2 Merkle tree make a selfish attack slightly more effective ?