Paper: Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network

[LiteCoinGuy]

Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network

Ethan Heilman from Boston University gave a talk at the security seminar on his recent Usenix Security paper. This is very interesting work demonstrating some worrying attacks on the Bitcoin network. I will briefly highlight some ideas from his talk. If you want more details, I would refer you to his paper.

https://medium.com/mit-security-seminar/eclipse-attacks-on-bitcoin-s-peer-to-peer-network-e0da797302c2

[BitcoinNewsMagazine]

Thanks good read.

[RustyNomad]

Read the article and understood some of the content but a large part also went over my head.

Short question.... can I sleep in peace at night or should I be keeping one eye on my wallet? I see it mentions that 'some' patches has been made but the 'some' is what concerns me.

Some of these countermeasures have been included and patched. This work demonstrates that Bitcoin’s security model, like any other security model, is flawed and requires further investigation.

[Guiomar]

This does not sound very critical.

What can an attacker do with an eclipse attack? It allows the attacker to launch a 51 percent attack with 40 percent mining power. Suppose the network contains 3 large mining nodes. Two control 30 percent of the mining power, and one controls 40 percent. If the attack owns the 40 percent mining power node, it can partition the other 2 miners so that they cannot build off of each other’s blocks, and can outcompete each partitioned miner. As a result, the attacker’s blockchain becomes the consensus block chain. Another attack is the n-confirmation double spending attack. This attack is more complex and is described in more detail in the paper.

yet...

The attack requires the users’ nodes to restart. However, this occurs fairly frequently because of software updates, packets of death/DoS attacks, and power/network failures.

How ofter do miners nodes get taken down?

How many nodes do big mining pools have? Are they limited to a single node? How do you know their ipv4 connection is the only one?

[fairglu]

This looks like an old already known attack.

In practice altcoins are very vulnerable to it, because they have few nodes and pools with limited monitoring and fast block times.

Bitcoin is less vulnerables because there are more nodes, slow block times, human 24/7 monitoring, and major pools do not rely on a single node or even just on p2p propagation that much.