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
Péter Szilágyi