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- Using bootstrap nodes to propagate initial network information - peers and their public keys if needed (already has a task:
).Jira server Hyperledger JIRA serverId 6326cb0b-65b2-38fd-a82c-67a89277103b key IR-1123 - Adding genesis block hash for peers to know with which peers to work. This is similar to having a password to connect to network. If peer knows bootstrap IP:port and genesis hash it can connect and sync blocks, if not - it will not make successful connection to this bootstrap.
- If When we have bootstrap node/nodes, that propagate initial network info, then we can easily make it universal and implement it in a form of Peer Exchange.
- To resolve the main problem we need to implement holding some number of peer connections, capped to some constant or config value. Like Around 15-20 connections will be enough for gossip protocol, and nodes will not search/request additional peers from bootstrap and any other nodes.
- It would be better to implement gossip protocol for transactions & block propagation, but current consensus protocol needs to send them to particular peer, don't know how can we circumvent this.
- Message format and encoding. If we want this system to be efficient, we can encode every message as Enum variant, and serialize/deserialize to/from CBOR format. It is very compact and useful.
- Traffic encryption. It is imperative to encrypt blockchain communication between the nodes to protect financial data from eavesdropping and MitM-attacks. So, I propose to implement Diffie-Hellman hand-shakes based on Elliptic Curves (x52219) and encrypting messages by ChaCha20Poly1305. For further DPI mitigation we can add some random garbage to handshakes as is done in Noise protocol. This approach will eliminate need of VPN.
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