In this paper, we identify a new form of attack, called the Balance attack, against proof-of-work blockchain systems. The novelty of this attack consists of delaying network communications between multiple subgroups of nodes with balanced mining power. Our theoretical analysis captures the precise tradeoff between the network delay and the mining power of the attacker needed to double spend in Ethereum with high probability. We quantify our probabilistic analysis with statistics taken from the R3 consortium, and show that a single machine needs 20 minutes to attack the consortium. Finally, we run an Ethereum private chain in a distributed system with similar settings as R3 to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, and discuss the application of the Balance attack to Bitcoin. Our results clearly confirm that main proof-of-work blockchain protocols can be badly suited for consortium blockchains.
Ethereum proposed the Ghost protocol to cope with this issue @cite_37 . The idea is simply to account for the blocks proposed by correct miners in the multiple branches of the correct blockchain to select the main branch. As a result, growing a branch the fastest is not sufficient for an attacker of Ethereum to be able to double spend. Even though the propagation strategy of Ethereum differs from the pull strategy of Bitcoin, some network attacks against Bitcoin could affect Ethereum. In the Eclipse attack @cite_19 the attacker forces the victim to connect to 8 of its malicious identities. The Ethereum adaptation would require to forge @math more identities and force as many connections as the default number of clients is 25. @cite_9 proposed a BGP hijacking attack and showed that the number of Internet prefixes that need to be hijacked for the attack to succeed depends on the distribution of the mining power. BGP-hijacking typically requires the control of network operators but is independent from Bitcoin and could potentially be exploited to delay network messages and execute a Balance attack in Ethereum.
@cite_19 @cite_37 @cite_9
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As the most successful cryptocurrency to date, Bitcoin constitutes a target of choice for attackers. While many attack vectors have already been uncovered, one important vector has been left out though: attacking the currency via the Internet routing infrastructure itself. Indeed, by manipulating routing advertisements (BGP hijacks) or by naturally intercepting traffic, Autonomous Systems (ASes) can intercept and manipulate a large fraction of Bitcoin traffic. This paper presents the first taxonomy of routing attacks and their impact on Bitcoin, considering both small-scale attacks, targeting individual nodes, and large-scale attacks, targeting the network as a whole. While challenging, we show that two key properties make routing attacks practical: (i) the efficiency of routing manipulation; and (ii) the significant centralization of Bitcoin in terms of mining and routing. Specifically, we find that any network attacker can hijack few (<100) BGP prefixes to isolate 50 of the mining power---even when considering that mining pools are heavily multi-homed. We also show that on-path network attackers can considerably slow down block propagation by interfering with few key Bitcoin messages. We demonstrate the feasibility of each attack against the deployed Bitcoin software. We also quantify their effectiveness on the current Bitcoin topology using data collected from a Bitcoin supernode combined with BGP routing data. The potential damage to Bitcoin is worrying. By isolating parts of the network or delaying block propagation, attackers can cause a significant amount of mining power to be wasted, leading to revenue losses and enabling a wide range of exploits such as double spending. To prevent such effects in practice, we provide both short and long-term countermeasures, some of which can be deployed immediately. Bitcoin is without a doubt the most successful cryptocurrency in circulation today, making it an extremely valuable target for attackers. Indeed, many studies have highlighted ways to compromise one or several Bitcoin nodes. In this paper, we take a different perspective and study the effect of large-scale network-level attacks such as the ones that may be launched by Autonomous Systems (ASes). We show that attacks that are commonly believed to be hard, such as isolating 50 of the mining power, are actually within the reach of anyone with access to a BGP-enabled network and hijacking less than 900 prefixes. Once on path, AS-level adversaries can then partition the Bitcoin network or delay block propagation significantly. The key factors that enable these attacks are the extreme centralization of Bitcoin, both from a routing and a mining perspective, along with the fact that Bitcoin messages are sent unencrypted, without integrity guarantees. We demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale attacks in practice against the deployed Bitcoin software and quantify their disruptive network-wide impact. The potential damage to Bitcoin is severe. By isolating a part of the network or delaying the propagation of blocks, network-level attackers can cause a significant amount of mining power to be wasted, leading to revenue losses and enabling a wide range of attacks such as double spending. We provide several suggestions on approaches to mitigate such attacks employing both short-term and long-term measures. Bitcoin is a disruptive new crypto-currency based on a decentralized open-source protocol which has been gradually gaining momentum. Perhaps the most important question that will affect Bitcoin’s success, is whether or not it will be able to scale to support the high volume of transactions required from a global currency system. We investigate the implications of having a higher transaction throughput on Bitcoin’s security against double-spend attacks. We show that at high throughput, substantially weaker attackers are able to reverse payments they have made, even well after they were considered accepted by recipients. We address this security concern through the GHOST rule, a modification to the way Bitcoin nodes construct and re-organize the block chain, Bitcoin’s core distributed data-structure. GHOST has been adopted and a variant of it has been implemented as part of the Ethereum project, a second generation distributed applications platform. We present eclipse attacks on bitcoin's peer-to-peer network. Our attack allows an adversary controlling a sufficient number of IP addresses to monopolize all connections to and from a victim bitcoin node. The attacker can then exploit the victim for attacks on bitcoin's mining and consensus system, including N-confirmation double spending, selfish mining, and adversarial forks in the blockchain. We take a detailed look at bitcoin's peer-to-peer network, and quantify the resources involved in our attack via probabilistic analysis, Monte Carlo simulations, measurements and experiments with live bitcoin nodes. Finally, we present countermeasures, inspired by botnet architectures, that are designed to raise the bar for eclipse attacks while preserving the openness and decentralization of bitcoin's current network architecture.