Implications of dissemination strategies on the security of distributed ledgers

Abstract

This paper describes a simulation study on security attacks over Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs). We specifically focus on attacks at the underlying peer-to-peer layer of these systems, that is in charge of disseminating messages containing data and transaction to be spread among all participants. In particular, we consider the Sybil attack, according to which a malicious node creates many Sybils that drop messages coming from a specific attacked node, or even all messages from honest nodes. Our study shows that the selection of the specific dissemination protocol, as well as the amount of connections each peer has, have an influence on the resistance to this attack.

Analyzing the Threats to Blockchain-Based Self-Sovereign Identities by Conducting a Literature Survey

“…Sybil attack: The Sybil attack [33,50,52,58,59,67,68,76,97] refers to a malicious node with several valid IDs, which are used to block users' transactions and disconnect network connections. Iqbal and Matulevicius [68] describe the variations of breaking the consensus protocol attack, generating fake transactions attack, tampering nodes reputation, nodes isolation (partition) attack, routing table insertion attack, Sybil-based linking (deanonymization) attack, and Sybil-based DoS/DDoS attack.…”

Simulation of Dissemination Strategies on Temporal Networks

“…This algorithm has been proposed to improve the Dandelion protocol, as some assumptions are not necessarily valid in practice and the theoretical properties of anonymity and guaranteed delivery may not always be ensured. The protocol is currently used by cryptocurrencies like Monero (Monero Project Blog (ErCiccione) 2021) and Zcoin (Serena et al 2020). Among the changes from the previous version there is a different policy for transactions forwarding.…”

“…Resilience against Sybil attacks (i.e. attacks where several nodes purposely do not relay the messages of certain users, trying to isolate them from the network) was analyzed in a previous paper (Serena et al 2020), pointing out that by integrating Dandelion with a fail-safe mechanism then a P2P system manages to remain operational even when facing a big amount of peers acting maliciously. In this performance evaluation, even if we do not consider the presence of attacks performed by other nodes, Dandelion still has some problems to achieve a 100% coverage.…”

Simulation of Hybrid Edge Computing Architectures

“…BitTorrent) and recently raised their popularity due to the advent of blockchains and cryptocurrencies [9], [13]. Communication in a P2P environment is a crucial issue and there are different solutions to ensure that two nodes can exchange data [14]. Hybrid P2P systems might employ some servers for coordination, to whom peers could ask the IP addresses of the other peers owning a certain resource.…”

“…LUNES was designed to be easily adaptable to various distributed environment configurations, allowing the users to model the protocols to be tested and the features of the simulated entities involved. In previous works, LUNES was employed to evaluate the impact of certain attacks on blockchains [14] or to simulate the dissemination of game events in P2P Multiplayer Online Games [26].…”