Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Development & Technical Discussion => Topic started by: voisine on March 20, 2014, 10:20:40 PM



Title: testnet nodes responding to mempool request with 50,000 tx hashes
Post by: voisine on March 20, 2014, 10:20:40 PM
I noticed today that several testnet nodes are responding to mempool messages with 50,000 txid's, even with a reasonably restrictive bloomfilter... anyone know what's going on? The txid's also don't show up on blockexplorer.com/testnet


Title: Re: testnet nodes responding to mempool request with 50,000 tx hashes
Post by: voisine on March 21, 2014, 05:28:34 AM
Looks like there are 100's of thousands of transactions being broadcast on testnet, most of which are not getting confirmed... some sort of spam/DOS attack or stress test? Does anyone know anything about it?


Title: Re: testnet nodes responding to mempool request with 50,000 tx hashes
Post by: deepceleron on March 21, 2014, 09:23:57 AM
Someone is upset at your use of apostrophe to make plural?

Anything goes on testnet - it is very cheap with the new bitcoin relay rules to spam testnet tx, for better or worse. If you can break testnet with tx spam, then it is a canary-in-the-mine for Bitcoin, so you might watch the way that Bitcoin becomes harder to use under such load and make your own bug reports if you can quantify.


Title: Re: testnet nodes responding to mempool request with 50,000 tx hashes
Post by: ScripterRon on March 21, 2014, 01:20:00 PM
Anything goes on testnet - it is very cheap with the new bitcoin relay rules to spam testnet tx, for better or worse. If you can break testnet with tx spam, then it is a canary-in-the-mine for Bitcoin, so you might watch the way that Bitcoin becomes harder to use under such load and make your own bug reports if you can quantify.
I've been seeing large 'inv' messages for transactions on prodnet as well.  When you send a 'getdata' request to the node, though, it doesn't respond. 

I've also been getting incoming connections that don't respond to a 'version' message and just disconnect and then connect again. 
I had one yesterday that did this continually until I banned the IP address.

And, of course, my favorite which sends dozens of double-spend transactions one after the other in rapid succession.