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peer-observer

Tool to monitor for P2P anomalies and attacks using well-behaving, passive Bitcoin Core honeynodes (honeypot nodes).

Components and their interaction

The peer-observer consists of multiple components. Primiarly an extractor that extracts events from a Bitcoin Core node and multiple tools that process the extracted data. The extractor and tools are connected with a nanomsg-based PUB-SUB TCP connection. The exchanged messages are serialized protobuf structures.

The extractor is written in Rust and uses the Bitcoin Core tracepoints to extract events like received and send P2P messages, open and closed P2P connections, mempool changes, and more. This is implemented using the USDT capabilites of libbpf-rs. The Bitcoin P2P protocol messages are deserialized using rust-bitcoin.

The tools are written in Python or Rust (or any other language that supports nanomsg and protobuf). They subscribe to the nanomsg publisher. For example, the logger tool simply prints out all messages that it receives, the metrics tool produces prometheus metrics, and the addr-connectivity tool tests received addresses if they are reachable. Python tools can make use of the protobuf/python-types to deserialize the Protobuf messages while Rust tools can use the types from the shared Rust module.

                                                ┌──────────────────────┐
                                      Nanomsg   │ Tools                │
                                      PUB-SUB   │                      │
                                         ┌──────┼──►logger             │
              Tracepoints                │      │                      │
┌───────────┐ via libbpf                 ├──────┼──►metrics            │
│  Bitcoin  │          ┌───────────┐     │      │                      │
│ Core Node ├──────────► extractor ├─────┼──────┼──►archiver           │
└───────────┘          └───────────┘     │      │                      │
                                         ├──────┼──►addr-connectivty   │
                                         │      │                      │
                                         └──────┼──►...                │
                                      protobuf  │                      │
                                      messages  └──────────────────────┘

Real-world usage

On public.peer.observer, I run a peer-observer instance with multiple Bitcoin Core honeynodes. To avoid leaking the IP addresses of these honeynodes (an P2P attacker would just not attack these), public access is limited.

Setting up a peer-observer instance is non-trivial as hooking into the Bitcoin Core tracepoints requires elevated system privileges. Additionally, a few not-yet-merged patches to Bitcoin Core are required at the moment. Documentation is sparse or non-existent. Feel free to open an issue if you still want to set up an instance and I'll do my best to add more documentation.