IACR News item: 19 May 2015
Andrew Miller, Rob Jansen
ePrint Reportrect 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.
Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.