I am running a raspberry pi 4 with umbrelOS and I have the bitcoin node running on it, however I was told to shut it down. However, the person who told me to shut it down-I'm afraid they don't know enough about it to know if there are security risks with running one on the local network. They think it could be a backdoor to all of our computers or that it could be used to sniff local traffic and they don't want to run that risk. If you know something about how this could be explained, that would be great.
1 Answer
This will rather depend on what type of node you are running.
Running a 'full node' (full archival node) should not put you at increased risk, given that you do not need to configure your router to accept connections from other nodes on the network.
However if you want to help the network and run a 'listening node' (super node) you will either need to configure your router to forward inbound connections on 8333 or run your node over the tor network.
This can put you at increased risk from people trying to access other services running on your machine listening on port 8333. This can be mitigated by running your node on a dedicated machine (as you are doing) to minimize the attack surface. Also configuring automatic security updates will help.
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