Warnet War 🧨

Inspiration

The rise of vulnerabilities in older versions of Bitcoin Core presented a unique opportunity to simulate, study, and develop attack strategies in a controlled, large-scale environment. We wanted to explore how legacy software behaves under adversarial conditions, especially when deployed in a dynamic peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Warnet provided the perfect battlefield for this exploration.

What it does

Our project uses the Warnet package to simulate, deploy, and interact with a realistic Bitcoin P2P network inside a Kubernetes cluster. It allows us to conduct both reconnaissance and attack scenarios against nodes running outdated or intentionally flawed versions of Bitcoin Core. Through a smaller 12-node "scrimmage" setup, we could iterate and test strategies locally before executing them in a remote 100+ node battlefield.

How we built it

• Installed Warnet in a Python virtual environment using this guide.
• Set up a local Kubernetes cluster using Docker Desktop to run the 12-node scrimmage network.
• Used the warnet deploy command to spin up the test environment and warnet dashboard to monitor the network.
• Wrote attack scenarios in Python using Warnet’s test_framework, allowing us to simulate real P2P behavior and RPC interactions.
• Accessed tanks using self.tanks["armada-0"] and ran targeted RPC and P2P commands to probe vulnerabilities.
• Used k9s and kubectl for cluster management and monitoring.

Challenges we ran into

• Managing Docker Desktop's resource limitations when running a full Kubernetes cluster.
• Understanding the deep internals of legacy Bitcoin Core and the RPC interface.
• Creating stable and reproducible scenarios that work across different flawed Bitcoin Core versions.
• Debugging malformed P2P behavior in nodes with fake disclosures or intentional flaws.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Successfully deployed Warnet locally and executed multiple scenarios in the scrimmage setup.
• Created custom Python scripts that simulate real-world attacks using Bitcoin Core's RPC and P2P interfaces.
• Identified vulnerabilities in older versions and observed unexpected network behavior in forks.
• Improved our understanding of decentralized systems security and Bitcoin Core internals.

What we learned

• Kubernetes is a powerful platform for simulating decentralized, adversarial networks.
• Legacy Bitcoin Core versions exhibit a variety of unexpected behaviors when stressed.
• The Warnet test framework makes it easy to interact with containerized Bitcoin nodes.
• Crafting effective attack scenarios requires understanding both network topology and protocol internals.

What's next for Warnet War

• Develop more sophisticated attack scripts like eclipse and consensus-splitting attacks.
• Share our scenarios and test cases with the broader Bitcoin dev community.
• Extend Warnet to simulate Layer 2 systems like the Lightning Network.
• Explore visualization tools to map out attack propagation and node behavior in real time.

Built with ❤️ and Python using Warnet

Built With

• python
• warnet