The discovery DHT contains a number of hosts with LAN and loopback IPs.
These get relayed because some implementations do not perform any checks
on the IP.
go-ethereum already prevented relay in most cases because it verifies
that the host actually exists before adding it to the local table. But
this verification causes other issues. We have received several reports
where people's VPSs got shut down by hosting providers because sending
packets to random LAN hosts is indistinguishable from a slow port scan.
The new check prevents sending random packets to LAN by discarding LAN
IPs sent by Internet hosts (and loopback IPs from LAN and Internet
hosts). The new check also blacklists almost all currently registered
special-purpose networks assigned by IANA to avoid inciting random
responses from services in the LAN.
As another precaution against abuse of the DHT, ports below 1024 are now
considered invalid.
nodeDB.querySeeds was not safe for concurrent use but could be called
concurrenty on multiple goroutines in the following case:
- the table was empty
- a timed refresh started
- a lookup was started and initiated refresh
These conditions are unlikely to coincide during normal use, but are
much more likely to occur all at once when the user's machine just woke
from sleep. The root cause of the issue is that querySeeds reused the
same leveldb iterator until it was exhausted.
This commit moves the refresh scheduling logic into its own goroutine
(so only one refresh is ever active) and changes querySeeds to not use
a persistent iterator. The seed node selection is now more random and
ignores nodes that have not been contacted in the last 5 days.
Table.mutex was being held while waiting for a reply packet, which
effectively made many parts of the whole stack block on that packet,
including the net_peerCount RPC call.
The previous metric was pubkey1^pubkey2, as specified in the Kademlia
paper. We missed that EC public keys are not uniformly distributed.
Using the hash of the public keys addresses that. It also makes it
a bit harder to generate node IDs that are close to a particular node.
This commit changes the discovery protocol to use the new "v4" endpoint
format, which allows for separate UDP and TCP ports and makes it
possible to discover the UDP address after NAT.
This a fix for an attack vector where the discovery protocol could be
used to amplify traffic in a DDOS attack. A malicious actor would send a
findnode request with the IP address and UDP port of the target as the
source address. The recipient of the findnode packet would then send a
neighbors packet (which is 16x the size of findnode) to the victim.
Our solution is to require a 'bond' with the sender of findnode. If no
bond exists, the findnode packet is not processed. A bond between nodes
α and β is created when α replies to a ping from β.
This (initial) version of the bonding implementation might still be
vulnerable against replay attacks during the expiration time window.
We will add stricter source address validation later.
Felix Lange
Ricardo Catalinas Jiménez
Péter Szilágyi