An Eclipse Attack in Crypto - Meaning and Consequences

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An eclipse? This may sound way too absurd because it's used to render a dark time in the atmosphere when the sun and the moon comes together. We have been anticipating this luner eclipse for months but we never saw it. This is very similar to an eclipse attack on crypto. It is a simple attack that an actor or user that is malicious may use to interfere with nodes on a network.

This attack on this nodes will cause an eclipse so to speak. The attack is aimed at obscuring a person's view of the P2P network to prepare for sophisticated attacks or to cause disruption in general. This may sound similar to an attack called sybil attack. In this form of attack, a user that is malicious will flood the network with fake peers with a different goal majorly on the surface of the network as floods is seen on the surface of the Earth.

An eclipse attack aims at a single node while the sybil attack is the entire network to gain the reputational system of the protocol. Let's look at how this eclipse attack works. Miners of bitcoins need specialized equipment to generate new blocks as full nodes are easily run on minimal operational power to aid decentralization of bitcoin and this can result to anyone spinning up a node on a low-speculative device .

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The software maintains a synchronized database of transactions with its immediate peers to remain lockstep with the network to avoid attacks. A factor that may seem limiting for many nodes bandwidth. There are a lot of devices running the software but the average device is not able to connect directly to many of them due to limitations set out in the bitcoins software which permits a maximum of 125 connections. In this type of attack, the malicious user will ensure that all of the target's connections are made to attacker controlled nodes.

This user will first flood the target with its own Ip addresses to avoid being tracked which the victim will likely connect to upon the restart of their software. A restart can mean the attacker simply wait for it to occur or he may be forced. Once this has occurred, the unsuspecting victim is at the mercy of the node that are malicious with no views of the wider network.

Every attack has consequences which include the following. If an attack is expending the results to alienate a peer from the network, they probably have a motive to do so and there are a handful of successful attacks that can be more launched easily once there is a suffocation in the node. The zero confirmation double spend.

This occurs if a user accept a transaction with no confirmations. There are risks of a double spend because the transaction may have been broadcast, but until it has been included in a block, the sender can easily craft a new transaction that spends the same funds elsewhere. A miner will likely include it before the original if the new transaction has a higher fee, invalidating the earlier one.

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Some business accept these zero confirmation transactions. It is just like a merchant who sells building parts. He is not a way that another merchant has eclipsed his nodes and suspects nothing as the second merchant places an order on expensive parts, then merchant then create a transaction which the first merchant broadcast to the network..

This transaction wasn't broadcast to the network because of the second merchant's malicious nodes which will not relay to honest nodes. While this transaction hangs, the second merchant spend the same funds on the real network, whether to another party or to an address the merchant owns.

Even if the transaction to the first merchant is seen eventually, it would be rejected as the coins has been spent. Another is N-confirmation double spend which is similar to zero confirmation. We'll look at this extensively in my next post.

Disclaimer: Any financial and crypto market information provided in this post was written for informational purposes only and does not constitute 100% investment advice. It's just basic knowledge every crypto trader or investor should have.