International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 19 May 2015

Andrew Miller, Rob Jansen
ePrint Report ePrint Report
We describe a new methodology that enables the di-

rect execution of multi-threaded applications inside of

Shadow, an existing parallel discrete-event network sim-

ulation framework. Our methodology utilizes function

interposition and an application-layer thread library to

emulate the ordinary thread interface to the application.

Using this methodology, we implement a new Shadow

plug-in that directly executes the Bitcoin reference client

software. We describe optimizations that enable scalable

execution of thousands of Bitcoin nodes on a single ma-

chine, and discuss how to model the Bitcoin network for

experimental purposes. Finally, we present novel denial-

of-service attacks against the Bitcoin software, which

exploit low-level implementation artifacts in the Bitcoin

reference client. We demonstrate these attacks using our

methodology, tools, and models.

Expand

Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.