Vlog #107: Question for a witness: What would be needed to bring down the blockchain?
Yesterday was an interesting day with the attack on Steemit.com.
But I believe it had a very positive side effect.
A lot of people were taught a little bit more about what a blockchain is.
With Steemit.com (website) being down a lot of users realized that busy.org was still up and running. (albeit had trouble logging into busy.org, I could still browse the website) and chainbb was fine too.
That's because Steemit and the Steem blockchain are not the same things.
Steemit is a website that taps into the Steem blockchain and pulls out data and shows it in a way that we are all familiar with.
Busy.org and Chainbb do the same thing and portray the same data in another format.
So yesterday, the blockchain was not attacked but the website Steemit.com was.
The data was therefore safe.
The Steem blockchain is kept alive by Witnesses and the cool thing is they (top 20) get paid from the same reward pool as you and me for doing this job. But it's an important job because without them, no blockchain.
At least that's what I think.
I realized that while making my blog I'm not 100% sure if that's even true.
What would actually be needed to bring down the Steem blockchain? Is it even possible?
If a witness could answer this question I would be very grateful.
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Great explanation for how the block chain works and how someone could attack the front end and not harm the actual block chain. This has taught me a lot about block chains in general and it's quite fascinating. It seems this is a subject I really enjoy and love learning about. While crypto currency I find fascinating b/c of it's utility and the good it can bring the world, I never really took the time to understand exactly how a block chain works. Really cool stuff. I didn't even think about why I could get on Esteem and not steemit.com, it makes perfect sense now.
Understanding how this works now, I don't know why every business in the world wouldn't want to be on a block chain. It seems much more secure and would give customers multiple avenues to conduct business while one of multiple front ends were under siege.
Great questions and look forward to the answers you get from some witnesses regarding this. Have a great workout brother and a great day!!
For hackers it is virtually impossible to bring down a blockchain unless the source code is badly written. However if 51% of the witnesses collaborate (or one witness gets 51% of the power) to attack/tamper with the blockchain there will be serious problems. Does this mean that the blockchain is down then? No, but it won't be very useful any more because the 51% attack could steal all funds from the users. Is this likely to happen? No, because the steemblockchain uses delegated proof of stake so they can loose their stake (which is 51%) when caught with tampering. If the source code of the blockchain is badly written and expose a backdoor to attack a witness (or all witnesses at once!) a single hacker could tamper with the data (move funds etc) what will make the blockchain die eventually unless the changes made by the hackers are reverted (aka what ethereum did after the DAO attack).
I don't think the steem blockchain can be brought down, but it can be slowed down. A DDOS is basically supposed to slow down websites by adding load to the servers. The servers then shut down automatically or manually because of the over load.
The blockchain itself, can be similarly over loaded. Remember what happened to Bitcoin a few months ago? Thousands of unconfirmed transactions, high fees etc. STEEM can face the same thing but is better prepared because of the role of witnesses.
Coming to a consensus is much easier on STEEM, if the block sizes have to increase for the network to run smoothly, witnesses can do so and an average of their declared sizes will be used. That's how witnesses had solved the bandwidth issue on the steem blockchain two months ago.
@sqamemal,
DDOS not only slow down, if servers can't handle the load it might open holes to the DB section!
Cheers~
What's really important are our Seed Nodes. The more we have and the more distributed they are the better. I was just wondering about how distributed our network was last week and actually investigated it and did up a report which you can find here.
We're currently not very well distributed with most nodes sitting in France, Germany and the US. Even with this type of consolidation all three countries would have to target those nodes at the same time to bring the Steem blockchain down. If they did we'd only have a few scattered nodes around the other countries that the whole network would be relying on. Likelihood of this happening is extremely low, but it'd be nice to see our blockchain network branch out and grow some more.
Oh yeah, we all were nervous yesterday with this attack, but thank God everything went well. I think it's almost impossible to hack blockchain, if only you have copied the secret keys, then you can hack everything. Conclusion: take care of secret keys! Thank you @exyle
This is always good advice!
There is only one easy way to compromise the blockchain and that is to compromise one of the witnesses. That can be done by:
Would one compromised witness be enough?
lol, o man @ezzy if you ever needed content for a book.
I don't know what the witnesses are doing exactly. Are there different tasks? Is there one who is responsible for the recruitment of new witnesses? If so, I would probably try to turn that one.
@exyle
for me its not possible as i think its a decentralized network running in a lot of nodes...
when it went off... i mean the site... i got info through eSteem and updated my post from chainbb and busy.org was ok for me then... which made me know its ddos attack and i updated my post to assuage nerves from my followers... nice one sir... always good post coming from you
@exyle I was never worried at all after viewing @jerrybanfield posting today. In fact it was nice to learn about Busy.org and Chainbb......
They been around for a while but still a little bit unknown to many it seems.
I think bringing down a blockchain is very unprovable unless there is some critical bug in the code.
Steemit is more vulnerable to attacks, maybe in a future sites like Steemit will be hosted in Maidsafe network so ddos attacks will not work.
The bitcoin protocol is according to the general opinion, extremely on. It is almost unassailable, however, as soon as we leave the network, and we are dealing with machines or humans that have the famous private keys that manage the transactions bitcoin, there are risks . And today we do not yet have the full measure of the means to implement to ensure the safety of the users facing these risks.