Bitcoin Global News (BGN)
June 08, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- Is the often
feared 51% attack a true threat to Blockchain
networks? If you don’t know what this is yet, just think about all
of the computers that keep a Blockchain running. Then imagine, what
would it take to take over a Blockchain and earn all of the coins
for yourself?
In theory, it’s easier than most
people would think. The name “51% attack,” comes from the idea that
the easiest way to take control of a Blockchain is to add nodes or
users to it that are loyal to you and more importantly, that have
computing power that is equal to 51% or more of the total computing
power that is currently on the network.
For most of the history of the
Crypto industry, insiders have claimed that running such an attack
is nearly impossible, mainly due to the computing power that it
takes to be successful as well as to the fact that the Blockchain
network knows when the attack is happening and therefore, has some
time to prevent it.
On a technical level, its a bit
more complicated than simply adding users that have this level of
power. What happens during a 51% attack is that the new nodes begin
confirming fake transactions in order to come out as the network
leaders, which includes gaining all of the block rewards until the
attack is stopped.
With the existence of specialized
computers like ASICS because traditional computers aren’t
exactly powerful enough to mine Crypto anymore, it does seem
reasonable that the attacker would have to have a group of ASICS
with more hash power than the
majority of the existing network, in order to carry out a 51%
attack.
The problem with all of this is,
even though doing so really does seem to be highly difficult, 51%
attacks have happened and they’ve happened in groups, recently,
according to a report by Coin Desk.
Among the networks that have been
affected lately, they list Monacoin, Bitcoin Gold, Zencash, Verge,
and Litecoin Cash. Of this group, Verge is perhaps the best one to
use to illustrate the danger of 51% attacks, due to how it dealt
with its own experiences with them.
In Verge’s case, they stick out
because of the apparent blunder their development team made while
trying to prevent the first 51% attack. Reportedly, hard forked their own
network’s code, while they were attempting to patch up its
vulnerabilities.
At this point, it might be helpful
to quickly explain what a hard fork is as well as what its
opposite, a soft fork is. A hard fork is a
change in a Blockchain network’s code that actually either cancels
out groups of previous blocks or brings in previously invalidated
groups of blocks. When this happens, every user on the network has
to update his or her version of the Blockchain, in order to keep
running it as well as keep his or her investments. All in all, a
hard fork is permanent.
In contrast, a soft fork is
temporary and appears to happen more accidentally in response to
network users or network “nodes,” acting against the rules that run
the network, in some way.
The problem with Verge’s hard fork
was that it didn’t take, apparently and it wasn’t well planned. On
May 22, Bitcoinist released
information that indicated that according to their
sources, Verge had been hacked again with an algorithm that was
almost the same as the first one that had been used successfully.
To make matters worse, instead of mainly just making fake copies of
the timestamps on Verge transactions, like the first attacker, the
second attacker was able to get into the network enough
to spoof the entire Verge
chain.
According to the same report, the
two attack algorithms, which we can conceptualize as functions that
“solve the network” to help the attackers, were used at the same
level of difficulty, which appears to mean that the offending users
had the same hashing power.
If this is actually true, then the
Verge team has more than a lot of work to do. There’s no real
logical excuse for making no changes to the network after an attack
that cost it $1 million. If the attackers had the same hashing
power, then the network was essentially running the same
algorithms, with little to no changes, related to the difficulty of
solving them.
The lesson here seems to be that
51% attacks are possible through the example of Verge, and if
you’re interested in reading about them as well, Zencash and the
others that have already been mentioned. The best way for
Blockchain networks to protect themselves against this issue seems
to be to increase the difficulty of their security algorithms,
above all. Furthermore, this phenomenon might also indicate major
changes on the horizon with regards to new security algorithms
being test by, and then being actively used by, industry
leaders.
By: BGN Editorial Staff
News:
Blockchain
ZenCash
(ZEN)
Verge (XVG)
Cryptocurrency