An Eclipse attack isolates a particular user within a P2P network through a malicious actor. An eclipse attack consists of redirecting outbound and inbound connections from the real neighboring nodes into the attacker’s control nodes, thereby hastening the target’s isolation from the actual network activity. The attacker can control the isolated node in various ways by confusing the current state of the blockchain, resulting in disruptions and illegitimate confirmations in block mining.
The ease at which eclipse attacks can successfully happen depends heavily on the elementary structure of the target’s blockchain since eclipse attacks rely on exploiting a target’s neighboring nodes.
How do Eclipse attack on Crypto happen?
A cryptocurrency eclipse attack occurs when the nodes found in a decentralized network are not able to connect simultaneously with other nodes because of bandwidth limitations, and would rather pair with limited neighbors. Because of this, malicious actors just need to trade-off only a limited number of nodes, instead of attacking the network, if it were Sybil attacks.
The attacker typically creates a compromised network from host nodes to flood a target node with IP addresses, which the target syncs up with the next time the target reconnects with blockchain. If the target syncs up with these addresses, the attacker has sealed off the node and compromised it. After that point, the attacker waits until the nodes connect with the target successfully or they use a Distributed Denial-of-Service to ensure the target makes a reconnection.
Even though it would require multiple trials to compromise a target server successfully, once a victim gets connected to a server controlled by the attacker, the attacker can pass false information to the unsuspecting victim often. In cryptocurrency, eclipse attacks typically have the following effects:
Double Spend: An attacker who has cut off the victim may try to get the victim to accept a transaction that makes use of the same input as other transactions that has been confirmed or an invalid input on the network. Since the advent of blockchain technology, malicious actors have used different types of double-spend attacks, and this is the main issue with this type of currency.
Miner Power Disruption: An attack shift the blame for mining orphan blocks to an eclipsed miner to trick their victims into wasting computing power and time mining blocks that have already been removed from blockchain. As a result, the attacker increases its hash rate and sways the block-mining race in their favor. Additionally, since a miner is effectively cut off from their legitimate network, attackers can decide to attack different miners inside the same network to lower the threshold for launching a 51% attack on the entire network.
Lots of users often wish to trade safely and there are many trading tools such as quantum-ai.io, which can help them achieve this. Yet, the possibility of a 51% attack shouldn’t just be ignored. How can this be stopped?
How can this attack be stopped?
If an attacker can access sufficient IP addresses, nodes can be eclipsed. Keeping inbound connections to a minimum and being careful with connections to other nodes is the easiest way for a node to avoid this. The downside is that if this approach is used by all nodes, it will make it more difficult to add new nodes to a blockchain network.
Since most blockchain projects are open-source and public, malicious actors can assess their structural underpinnings easily to find vulnerabilities. Due to the difficulty of approving and implementing structural changes midway through the lifecycle of a blockchain network, the best method to handle cryptocurrency eclipse attacks is to set the network’s node settings to withstand eclipse attacks from day one. Other ways to do this include
- Increased node connection
- Deterministic nide selection
- New node restriction and
- Random node selection
Bottom Line
While only a few users are affected by cryptocurrency eclipse attacks, constant attacks on an account can destroy the trust within a network and ultimately undermine it without any defense. It is, therefore, crucial to take the time to understand the underlying consensus mechanisms of your favorite blockchain projects, in addition to the potential use cases and tokenomics.
