On August 1, 2018, we announced the release of Multiven B-Fence, the world’s first early-warning threat alert system and cyberdefence platform, for Bitcoin nodes and their Internet gateway routers, in alpha.

Today, Multiven is glad to announce that the “Follow” feature is live on B-Fence. Hence, you can now follow your node to get real-time status change notifications and very soon, predictive alerts and security updates to limit the attack surface of your node and its connected Internet router.

Now lets take a little deep-dive into how Multiven B-Fence works.

B-Fence runs a crawler that polls nodes and renders this data on its Finney Map (named in honour of the late legendary cryptographer Hal Finney, the first person to run a Bitcoin node) located at https://nodes.multiven.io ; In the process, it also attempts to guess the IP address of the gateway router that connects each node to other nodes. In the future, B-Fence will crowd-source gateway validation from node operators; In the event of a cyber-attack on a node or its gateway, B-Fence flags the node and makes an alert API call to Multiven TAC that multicasts a cyber-support task to one of Multiven’s 1,200 decentralised Internet engineering experts, security researchers and cryptographers in 60 countries, and one of them will accept the task and promptly resolve the problem; (coming very soon) The coolest part of this is that the solution to the problem encountered by each node and/or router, which could be as simple as applying a configuration command or deploying a security software update, are proactively pushed to all nodes and routers running similar software versions. This dramatically reduces their attack surface and makes the overall node-network, way more resilient. (coming very soon)

So, we urge you all to Follow your Bitcoin nodes at https://nodes.multiven.ioand soon, you will be able to volunteer basic information about your gateway routers e.g. its software version, vendor etc., that will enable us to push accurate solutions, fixes and security updates to it, via its profile on B-Fence.

Thank you for collaborating with us and the community as we collectively strive to secure the future of Bitcoin.

/Regis Millet — Multiven B-Fence, Lead Developer