On the Sustainability of Bitcoin Partitioning Attacks
Abstract
A series of recent studies have shown that permissionless blockchain peer-to-peer networks can be partitioned at low cost (e.g., only a few thousand bots are needed), stealthily (e.g., no control plane detection is available), or at scale (e.g., the entire bitcoin network can be divided into two). In this paper, we focus on the sustainability of partitioning attacks in Bitcoin, which is barely discussed in the literature. Existing studies investigate new partitioning attack strategies extensively but not how long the partition they create lasts. Our findings show that, fortunately for Bitcoin, the permissionless peer-to-peer network can be partitioned but only for a short time. In particular, two recent partitioning attacks (i.e., Erebus, SyncAttack) do not maintain partitions for more than 10 minutes in most cases. After analyzing Bitcoin’s peer eviction mechanism (which makes the two original attacks difficult to sustain), we propose optimization strategies for the two attacks and calculate the total cost of the optimized attacks for a 1-hour attack duration. Our results complement the original attack studies: (i) the optimized Erebus attack shows that it requires at least one adversary-controlled Bitcoin node close to a target and a few additional expensive attack steps for sustainable attacks, and (ii) the optimized SyncAttack can create sustainable partitions only with excessive cost.
Research Area: Network Security
People
BibTex
@INPROCEEDINGS{ha2023sustainability,
isbn = {978-3-031-47750-8},
abbrev_source_title = {LNCS},
copyright = {In Copyright - Non-Commercial Use Permitted},
doi = {10.3929/ethz-b-000611944},
year = {2024},
booktitle = {Financial Cryptography and Data Security: 27th International Conference, FC 2023},
volume = {13951},
type = {Conference Paper},
editor = {Baldimtsi, Foteini and Cachin, Christian},
journal = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
author = {Ha, Jaehyun and Baek, Seungjin and Tran, Muoi and Kang, Min Suk},
size = {15 p.},
abstract = {A series of recent studies have shown that permissionless blockchain peer-to-peer networks can be partitioned at low cost (e.g., only a few thousand bots are needed), stealthily (e.g., no control plane detection is available), or at scale (e.g., the entire bitcoin network can be divided into two). In this paper, we focus on the sustainability of partitioning attacks in Bitcoin, which is barely discussed in the literature. Existing studies investigate new partitioning attack strategies extensively but not how long the partition they create lasts. Our findings show that, fortunately for Bitcoin, the permissionless peer-to-peer network can be partitioned but only for a short time. In particular, two recent partitioning attacks (i.e., Erebus, SyncAttack) do not maintain partitions for more than 10 minutes in most cases. After analyzing Bitcoin’s peer eviction mechanism (which makes the two original attacks difficult to sustain), we propose optimization strategies for the two attacks and calculate the total cost of the optimized attacks for a 1-hour attack duration. Our results complement the original attack studies: (i) the optimized Erebus attack shows that it requires at least one adversary-controlled Bitcoin node close to a target and a few additional expensive attack steps for sustainable attacks, and (ii) the optimizedSyncAttack can create sustainable partitions only with excessive cost.},
issn = {0302-9743},
keywords = {Bitcoin; Partitioning Attacks},
language = {en},
address = {Cham},
publisher = {Springer},
title = {On the Sustainability of Bitcoin Partitioning Attacks},
PAGES = {166 - 181},
Note = {27th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2023); Conference Location: Bol, Brač, Croatia; Conference Date: May 1-5, 2023}
}Research Collection: 20.500.11850/611944