Blockchain Security from the Bottom Up by Howard E. Poston III

Author:Howard E. Poston, III [Poston, Howard E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119898634
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2022-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

Attacking the Blockchain Network

Blockchain networks can be attacked in a few different ways. The impacts of these attacks range from disruptions and degraded performance to the potential for double-spends and attacks on blockchain consensus. Three types of network-level attacks against the blockchain are as follows:

Denial of service

Eclipse/routing

Sybil

Denial-of-service Attacks

As a distributed, decentralized system, blockchains are supposed to be immune to traditional denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. In a traditional DoS attack, the attacker attempts to overwhelm a single point of failure or bottleneck in the system, resulting in degraded functionality. For example, many real-world DoS attacks attempt to flood a webserver with connection attempts. Once the webserver's connection capacity is exceeded, it can no longer accept legitimate connections.

In a fully decentralized blockchain, there is no central authority operating the network, so no permanent single point of failure exists. However, temporary single points of failure exist in many blockchain implementations, and some implementations are not fully decentralized. Either of these enable DoS attacks to be performed against the system.

An example of a temporary single point of failure is the block creator selected by the blockchain consensus algorithm. These algorithms are designed to ensure that only a single person can be selected to create a block within a given interval. If an attacker can predict the next block creator before they have the opportunity to generate and distribute a block (which is definitely possible in Proof of Stake), they can DoS that user. At a minimum, distribution of the block may be delayed, and the block may even be ignored if it is not published within the appropriate interval.

While the original blockchain had no permanent single points of failure, modifications have been made to the protocol to create them in some instances. All private and permissioned blockchain implementations have some level of centralization since someone has the ability to allow/deny access to the blockchain network or elevated privileges on the network. Examples of these single points of failure (which can be DoSed) include membership service providers (MSPs) on the Hyperledger private blockchain and the use of masternodes on a variety of permissioned blockchains.

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