“These random people that were connecting to them would send 500 messages, and each of those 500 messages would contain 10 addresses, that were supposed to represent other nodes on the network,” Provoost said.
As previously discussed in episode 13, Bitcoin nodes are connect to peers on the network through IP addresses, which they learn from their existing peers.
On top of that, van Wirdum and Provoost explained, the attack could offer the attacker insight into Bitcoin’s network topology by analyzing how the fake IP addresses spread through the network.
Finally, van Wirdum and Provoost discussed how the attack was solved by rate limiting the amount of shared IP addresses that any node will allow its peers to receive.