(IJCH) 51% Attack? Great Firewall of China? Yeah sure. What about Segmentation?
Snippet: "All who think it just takes a 51% attack to cripple a blockchain are severely misinformed. Because of its notoriety, the Great Firewall of China is less of a threat than a segmentation attack and subsequent majority control."
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51% Attack? Great Firewall of China? Yeah sure. What about Segmentation?
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All who think it just takes a 51% attack to cripple a blockchain are severely misinformed.
Here's just a few ways to do it: Sybil attack, Packet sniffing, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks - Crypto Kitties and Etherium, Influencing a clock drift against a target (a factor in yesterday's $8 million USD worth of NXM wallet theft from Hugh Karp - NEXUS MUTUAL CEO), Camouflaged Illegal blockchain content, Segmentation, attacking everyone on the net, Intentionally dropping transactions, The Finney Attack, Rival or malicious client code, Instigating unauthorized coin destruction/token burn, Creating millions of addresses, Hash rate collusion, Making "valid", low difficulty blocks.
Today's Topic: Segmentation
A segmentation attack and subsequent majority control is a major threat because it's done covertly and uses the "divide and conquer" strategy.
A couple of rough analogies are: 1) the Gerrymandered electoral college in U. S. politics and 2) the process behind the scenes of a hostile corporate takeover.
In both cases, when someone finally notices something's fishy, the game is already over.
Here's a simplified explanation of the process:
The Bad Guy (TBG) populates the network with IP addresses under his control.
When one of them gets a packet, TBG can see if it was received near the authentic send time. If viewed repeatedly, TBG now knows this unique sender.
When that sender initiates another transaction, TBG knows and can do whatever malicious things he desires before the sender gets the first confirmation. TBG could pose as the sender to receive or to attack the network.
Which brings me to Layer 2, Off-Chain solutions.
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Layer 2, Off-Chain solutions (e.g., Lightning and Raiden Networks), make it easy to create little fiefdoms
with one powerfully centralized player.
Let's say, King JaiChai IX of the Royal Sidechain of New Hawaii has but one obligation to the main chain - broadcasting the beginning and end of transactions going through his kingdom. The rest (majority) of the time, whatever goes on in JaiChai Land is virtually invisible.
"King JaiChai IX and his fellow King cohorts will seize any opportunity to fatten their Royal Treasuries with "donations" from supporters - foreign or domestic."
Finally rambled to this story's main issue:
"Hope someone bothers to peek inside a few of these sidechains instead of simply monitoring Global Hash rates with the other billion watchers."
By JaiChai
"Really Appreciate You Stopping By. Truly hope to see you again!"
And if you liked my post, kindly Upvote, Comment and Follow.
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Believing that school was too boring, he dropped out of High School early; only to earn an AA, BS and MBA in less than 4 years much later in life – while working full-time as a Navy/Marine Corps Medic.
In spite of a fear of heights and deep water, he performed high altitude, free-fall parachute jumps and hazardous diving ops in deep, open ocean water.
After 24 years of active duty, he retired in Asia.
Since then, he's been a full-time, single papa and actively pursuing his varied passions (Writing, Disruptive Technology, Computer Science and Cryptocurrency - plus more hobbies too boring or bizarre for most folk).
He lives on an island paradise with his girlfriend, teenage daughter and two dogs.
JaiChai 12-16-2020. Simultaneous multi-site submissions posted. All rights reserved.