Computers & Security
Learn basic blockchain concepts and algorithms in Python from our latest book Foundations of Blockchain written by Koshik Raj. Bitfinex reduced the bitcoin funds of all their customers by 36%, including the customers whose wallets were not compromised. Newly minted BFX tokens were deposited eclipse attack in customers’ accounts in proportion to their losses. Since these tokens did not have any intrinsic value in any other exchanges, they promised to buy back these distributed tokens eventually. We use cookies to help provide and enhance our service and tailor content and ads.
Hao Wang is an associate professor in Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Norway. His research interests include big data eclipse attack analytics, industrial internet of things, high performance computing, safety-critical systems, and communication security.
Heart Attack
The attacker node is directly connected to the victim node, as shown in Figure 1. The attack looks similar to the man-in-the-middle attack performed between the client and the server in a centralized network. We will assume that attack takes place in Bitcoin’s Proof of Work ecosystem to understand and analyze the eclipse attack in the coming sections. If the attacker wants to launch an eclipse attack on an IoT device, what the attacker can do is to first launch a man-in-the-middle attack by targeting an IoT device’s gateway. Once the gateway is compromised, the attacker has full control of the victim IoT device’s data such as block synchronization requests, and can therefore force connection to the malicious nodes. The IoT device becomes isolated from the rest of the peer-to-peer network and thus, becoming impossible to view the real blockchain network. While Bitcoin nodes make only eight outgoing TCP connections to form the gossip network that propagates transactions and blocks, Ethereum nodes make 13.
He has published 80+ papers in reputable international journals and conferences. Chunhua Su received the BS degree for Beijing Electronic and Science Institute, in 2003 and recieved the MS and Ph.D. degree in computer science from Faculty of Engineering, Kyushu University, in 2006 and 2009, respectively. He is currently working as an assistant professor in School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute eclipse attack of Science and Technology. His research areas include algorithm, cryptography, data mining and RFID security & privacy. Guangquan Xu is a Ph.D. and full professor at the Tianjin Key Laboratory of Advanced Networking , College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, China. Naturally, a large part of what makes this vector exploitable is the ease with which an entity can spin up such identities.
- The node will believe in a completely different truth than the rest of the network after the node is compromised by the attack.
- We will look into the details of eclipse attacks based on the first of these papers.
- The attacker makes sure that the node will not communicate with the blockchain network.
- Protocol heuristics and alternative connections to the internet currently provide users of Bitcoin network strong protection from eclipse attacks.
- Another paper, titled Low-Resource Eclipse Attacks on Ethereum’s Peer-to-Peer Network, which was published in 2018, analyzed the feasibility of an eclipse attack in the Ethereum network.
- Generally, eclipse attacks are performed on high-profile blockchain nodes such as miners or merchants.
Selective Content Poisoning
When even a single node presents users with a different version of the blockchain, they will be warned of an error that effectively defeats the attack. In other words, an attack occurs when the majority of peers on a network are malicious and are gaining control of the connections of a specific node. Attackers in control of such connections can ensure that this specific node is surrounded by malicious nodes. Further, rather than attacking the entire network as in a Sybil attack, in an eclipse attack, the attacker focuses on isolating and targeting a specific node.
We must also consider the possibility of attack from state-level actors with low cost access to tier-1 ISPs and large blocks of IP addresses. I will discuss some potential future mitigation techniques in part two of this article. According to research findings, it doesn’t take much from a malicious actor to successfully carry out an eclipse attack. Heilman et al’s 2018 paper showed that it takes only a few machines to perform an eclipse attack on the Ethereum network. As in Bitcoin, a node on the Ethereum network relies on connections to its peers to get a full view of the network. In an eclipse attack, an attacker takes control of all the connections going to and from a targeted victim’s node.
Bitcoin Strongly Heads Towards $20k While Some Still Await $15k Retracement
This attack often results in the victim node receiving a manipulated, fake view of the blockchain. Malicious nodes block the victim node’s view of the real blockchain with their imposter blockchain. Hence the name of one of blockchain’s major security threats—the eclipse attack. Clients of permissionless blockchain systems, like Bitcoin, rely on an underlying peer-to-peer network to send and receive transactions. It is critical that a client is connected to at least one honest peer, as otherwise the client can be convinced to accept a maliciously forked view of the blockchain. In such an eclipse attack, the client is unable to reliably distinguish the canonical view of the blockchain from the view provided by the attacker.
The node will believe in a completely different truth than the rest of the network after the node is compromised by the attack. Generally, eclipse attacks are performed on high-profile blockchain nodes such as miners or merchants. Protocol heuristics and alternative connections to the internet currently provide users of Bitcoin network strong protection from eclipse attacks. However, as more value begins to move through the network there will be strong economic motivations for attackers to attempt these attacks.
Consuming Defi Protocols
And while Ethereum’s peer-to-peer network uses a secure encrypted channel, Bitcoin’s network does not. Since the eclipse attack is performed on the network layer, it can break the security of the consensus layer too. Any attack on the consensus layer can be more effective when the node’s peer-to-peer protocol is compromised. A 51 percent attack without the attacker owning the majority of the computing power, or the double-spend attack even after several block confirmations, can both be performed when an eclipse attack is performed.