libp2p / libp2p/go-libp2p

E. 📢 Judicious Address Advertisements

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Epic
Dominant language
Go
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

**Why**: A node that advertises lots of addresses hurts itself. Other nodes will have to try dialing a lot of addresses before they find one that actually works, dramatically increasing handshake latencies.

**Goal**: Nodes only advertise addresses that they are actually reachable at.

**How**: Unfortunately, the AutoNAT protocol can’t be used to probe the reachability of any particular address (especially due to a bug in the go-libp2p implementation deployed years ago). Most likely, we need a second version of the AutoNAT protocol.

Related discussion: [https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p/issues/1480](https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p/issues/1480)

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading the AutoNAT protocol context in this issue and the related discussion in go-libp2p issue 1480. Then trace the existing AutoNAT implementation and address-advertisement flow to determine the protocol changes required. Done means the design and implementation can identify which advertised addresses are actually reachable without relying on the known AutoNAT limitation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go
Domain
networking
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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