Bribery Attack And It's Negative Impact On The Blockchain Network

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INTRODUCTION

Bribery attack, is one of the many digital based and cryptographic attack which has the potential to exploit and take advantage of the vulnerabilities in blockchain network and this bribery attack has the potential to beat the blockchain robust security protocols and cause very significant damages and disadvantages.

The bribery attack is propagated, operates or facilitated by attackers or malicious persons offering incentives or bribe to miners or validators so as to help them in carrying out fraudulent activities like manipulating the outcome or results of the consensus process, excluding or not recording certain transactions, validate fraudulent blocks, or even facilitate a double spending attack.

The bribery attack poses a significant threat and risk to blockchain networks, in this post of mine I am going to be explaining and discussing some of the significant and noteworthy disadvantages of bribery attacks on blockchain networks, further highlighting their potential to disrupt the operation of the consensus mechanisms.

• DISRUPTION OF THE CONSENSUS MECHANISM

The bribery attack has the potential to disrupt the operations of the blockchain networks consensus mechanism, blockchain networks majorly employs or uses the proof of work consensus mechanism or the proof of stake consensus mechanism, these consensus mechanisms play very important roles in the blockchain network that should not be disrupted.

The disruption of the blockchains consensus mechanism can be said to be one of the most critical disadvantages of bribery attacks, basically because it makes it so that the different nodes in the network cannot come to an agreement or consensus in regards to the state of network because some of the nodes have been bribed to take actions or excute transactions in a manner that disrupt and undermines the consensus mechanisms.

Additionally, this disruption of the blockchain networks consensus mechanism can lead to inconsistencies in the blockchain network and as a result making it difficult to determine the correct and valid state of the blockchain network, ultimately leading to erosion of the users trust in the network and its ability to maintain a united, consistent and accurate ledger.

• COMPROMISES NETWORK SECURITY

Bribery attacks causes significant compromise and undermining of the security of blockchain networks, this is another noteworthy disadvantage of the bribery attack to blockchain network, this can be achieved by basically offering financial incentives and bribes to miners or validators so as to persuade them to help compromise the blockchain security.

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The blockchain miners or validators are basically the foundational blocks on which the blockchain operations are built on and if they have been compromised and bribed to take part in attacking the network, we can be sure that the effects will be very drastic and severe, leading to security breaches, leaving the network susceptible to every other type of attack.

Attacks like double spending attacks, where by the attacker would bribe a significant portion or percent of miners to execute transactions in a manner that allows him to spend the same cryptocurrency more than once, causing significant financial losses for users most especially.

• INCREASES TRANSACTION COST AND DELAYS

Bribery attacks also causes another disadvantage, which is increasing processing transaction costs and causing delays in transaction processing, basically this is caused when attackers bribe miners or validators to prioritize or only process certain transactions or blocks, this will cause the users whose transactions are not processed to experience delays.

Therefore, this bribery attack disrupts the way in which transactions are to be processed and confirmed which might most likely lead to other users trying to bribe and incentive the miners or validators to process their own transactions first, ultimately this will lead to an overall increase in the cost of processing transactions.

• POSES RISKS OF CENTRALIZATION

The bribery attack has the potential to eliminate the basic decentralized nature of the blockchain network therefore, this risk centralization which the facilitation and execution of a bribery attack imposes can be considered to be the most fundamental and significant disadvantage, seeing as decentralization is the logo or the golden feature of the blockchain technology and blockchain networks.

Decentralization is basically that feature and property of blockchain networks that ensures that the network is not ran, governed and controlled by on single or central individual, person or entity, but the bribery attack aims to undermine this feature of decentralization by bribing miners or validators to combine their validation power thereby giving them central control over the network.

Additionally, centralization only serves to undermine the foundation in which decentralization has created for all blockchain networks hence, making the blockchain network more vulnerable and susceptible to attacks, lack of transparency, manipulation and less resilient to failures.

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CONCLUSION

Therefore, this is how this post of mine comes to an end or conclusion I would like to say a very big thank to everyone who made the effort to read and go through this post which I have made, and I hope that you have been able to learn something new, this post basically is aimed at explaining the disadvantages of the bribery attack on blockchain networks.