Should full nodes be public?

Question

Since part of the security comes from it being hard to find enough nodes to peer with to influence the selected transactions, should full nodes be mostly hidden?

Will a IOTA attack consist of botnets scanning for nodes to peer with?

Should all full nodes be public but not accept peering automatically?

Answer 1

Full nodes should not be public.

Some reasons:

• If they were, attackers could easily find out, which nodes they have to connect to, in order to get the best result out of an attack. (Omnipresence, Double Spending)
• If they were displayed in an ordered list, people would very likely pick the first few or as their neighbours. This would result in a few nodes with a lot of neighbours and a lot of nodes with very few neighbours.

How am I supposed to get neighbours?

Ask for neighbours in the #nodesharing channel of the IOTA-Slack and wait for people to send you their IPs.

There are some plans to make it easier and more secure to find neighbours. (Nelson, Github)

Answer 2

Should IOTA grow automatic node discovery is a must. The more nodes the better the network will be. Manual node management could kill the platform. CarrIOTA Nelson seems be promissing for the discovery task. And Nelson managed nodes are in fact publicly exposed.

Answer 3

It is considered good practice to NOT expose your full node's IP to the public. If I was a hacker wanting to crash the IOTA network I guess I'd appreciate a list of all full node IP's very much. It would provide an incredibly easy DDoS target. So, join IOTA's slack channel and post a message saying that you setup a full node and then wait for private messages from other full node operators. This, I think, is still the safest way.