People have tried to develop many different attack vectors on cryptocurrencies, from codebase flaws, cryptographic algorithms, mining processes, consensus protocols and block propagation mechanisms to the underlying network layer. Most attacks could be patched quickly by modifying the source code, but preventing attacks that exploit the network layer remains a non-trivial problem as the network layer heavily relies on the existing Internet infrastructure, which is impractical to change. So network-layer attacks could be dangerous, powerful and hard to mitigate.

In this post, I would like to introduce some recent attacks against the Bitcoin P2P network. Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Attacking the Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer Network →