Paper 2015/263

Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network

Ethan Heilman, Alison Kendler, Aviv Zohar, and Sharon Goldberg

Abstract

We present eclipse attacks on bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network. Our attack allows an adversary controlling a sufficient number of IP addresses to monopolize all connections to and from a victim bitcoin node. The attacker can then exploit the victim for attacks on bitcoin’s mining and consensus system, including N-confirmation double spending, selfish mining, and adversarial forks in the blockchain. We take a detailed look at bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network, and quantify the resources involved in our attack via probabilistic analysis, Monte Carlo simulations, measurements and experiments with live bitcoin nodes. Finally, we present countermeasures, inspired by botnet architectures, that are designed to raise the bar for eclipse attacks while preserving the openness and decentralization of bitcoin’s current network architecture.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
BitcoinP2PNetworkingEclipseDouble-spend
Contact author(s)
Ethan R Heilman @ gmail com
History
2015-07-02: revised
2015-03-22: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2015/263
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/263,
      author = {Ethan Heilman and Alison Kendler and Aviv Zohar and Sharon Goldberg},
      title = {Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2015/263},
      year = {2015},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/263}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/263}
}
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