2020/07/05 by Bithin Alangot, Daniël Reijsbergen, Alangot, Bithin +5
Computer Science · #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Spam and Phishing Detection #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2007.02287
Clients of permissionless blockchain systems, like Bitcoin, rely on an\nunderlying peer-to-peer network to send and receive transactions. It is\ncritical that a client is connected to at least one honest peer, as otherwise\nthe client can be convinced to accept a maliciously forked view of the\nblockchain. In such an eclipse attack, the client is unable to reliably\ndistinguish the canonical view of the blockchain from the view provided by the\nattacker. The consequences of this can be catastrophic if the client makes\nbusiness decisions based on a distorted view of the blockchain transactions. In\nthis paper, we investigate the design space and propose two approaches for\nBitcoin clients to detect whether an eclipse attack against them is ongoing.\nEach approach chooses a different trade-off between average attack detection\ntime and network load. The first scheme is based on the detection of suspicious\nblock timestamps. The second scheme allows blockchain clients to utilize their\nnatural connections to the Internet (i.e., standard web activity) to gossip\nabout their blockchain views with contacted servers and their other clients.\nOur proposals improve upon previously proposed eclipse attack countermeasures\nwithout introducing any dedicated infrastructure or changes to the Bitcoin\nprotocol and network, and we discuss an implementation. We demonstrate the\neffectiveness of the gossip-based schemes through rigorous analysis using\noriginal Internet traffic traces and real-world deployment. The results\nindicate that our protocol incurs a negligible overhead and detects eclipse\nattacks rapidly with high probability, and is well-suited for practical\ndeployment.\n