Bitcoin research and development center, Brink, has announce One-year scholarship renewal for Sebastian Falbesoner, aka theStack. “As part of his grant renewal request, he emphasized the importance of the BIP324 Release 2 P2P port and why he plans to spend review time on the project,” the announcement read.
BIP324 aims to address a weakness of Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer (P2P) communication layer, whereby messages are currently sent unencrypted. Sebastian highlights the need for opportunistic encryption among bitcoin nodes to combat censorship, privacy breaches, and other attacks. He explains, “BIP324 attempts to counter these shortcomings by adding opportunistic encryption between Bitcoin nodes, which makes it much more difficult for adversaries to carry out these attacks.”
The proposal includes a protocol that blocks the initiation of connections between peers, ensuring that minimal information is disclosed to outside observers. This is achieved through the use of EligatorSwift, a modern elliptic curve point coding scheme. In addition, an extra bit of random bytes, known as “garbage”, is exchanged during connection initiation to further muddy the size of packets, making it difficult for potential attackers to detect.
Sebastian expressed his fascination with BIP324’s pseudo-random approach, saying, “If we imagine a world where this v2 cryptographic transport protocol is mostly used…then censoring any Bitcoin participant at the network level would be much harder.” It highlights that deep packet inspection and man-in-the-middle attacks will become much more difficult to implement.
Recognizing the importance of BIP324 to ensuring Bitcoin’s censorship-proof P2P layer, Brink extended Sebastian’s part-time scholarship for another year. Sebastian plans to conduct comprehensive code reviews, test remaining BIP324 pull requests, and run a publicly accessible BIP324 compliant node as soon as a functional pull request becomes available.