Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin\x92s Peer-to-Peer Network

Speaker/Bio

Ethan Heilman is a PhD student in the department of Computer Science at Boston University. This work represents joint work with Alison Kendler, Aviv Zohar, and Sharon Goldberg and will be presented at USENIX 2015.

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\x92s 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\x92s current network architecture.