How Blockchain DDoS Attacks Work

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attack designed to flood a website with an overwhelmingly large amount of internet traffic. As a result, the website’s infrastructure fails to cope with it, causing it to crash. These attacks are often carried out against websites hosted on a single or a few server machines.

Blockchain networks are resistant to traditional DDoS attacks because their decentralized design removes any single point of failure: the network data is duplicated across each of its nodes. However, blockchain networks are susceptible to a modified DDoS attack. Rather than flooding the network with pings or requests, malicious actors can instead flood it with spam transactions. This significantly clogs and slows the network’s throughput of legitimate transactions.

In this article, we’ll cover the two main ways that DDoS attacks are typically executed on blockchain networks and the impact they can have. We’ll also look at some examples of major DDoS attacks (both by malicious actors and simply by poorly designed dapps). Finally, we’ll offer some concluding thoughts on blockchain DDoS attacks and how to help protect against them.

Before getting into the finer details of DDoS attacks on blockchain networks, it’s worth briefly discussing how these networks operate and what this means for DDoS attacks on them.

Blockchain networks are decentralized by design — they have anywhere from a few to several thousand nodes validating transactions. Users submit transactions on the network,

This design means that a single node falling victim to a traditional DDoS attack and going down is no issue for the network. The other nodes continue competing to be selected to validate subsequent blocks of transactions, so it’s business as usual for the blockchain. However, while this design does make blockchain networks more resistant to traditional DDoS attacks, it doesn’t make them entirely immune to them. A blockchain network’s level of resistance to DDoS attacks can vary significantly.

Resistance depends on a few factors, such as the number of nodes validating transactions on the network, whether the validator schedule is known, the node client diversity, and the total network hash rate. For example, a blockchain network with just a handful of nodes running the same client is far more vulnerable to a DDoS attack than one with a thousand nodes running several different clients.

DDoS attacks on a blockchain network focus on attacking its protocol layer rather than its individual nodes. The two most commonly used DDoS attacks on blockchain networks are transaction flooding and smart contract attacks.

Transaction flooding is the most commonly seen DDoS attack in the blockchain space. The majority of blockchains have a fixed block size. Each block has a defined upper limit for the number of transactions it can handle. Blocks are produced at fixed intervals, and any transactions not included in the current block are stored as pending transactions in the blockchain’s “mempool.” These pending transactions sit in the mempool until a validator includes them in a subsequent block.

A malicious actor can fill confirmed blocks with them by flooding the blockchain with spam transactions. This can prevent legitimate transactions from being confirmed, forcing them into the mempool. As long as the attacker continues to flood the network, these legitimate transactions will stay in the mempool and remain pending. At this point, the attacker has achieved its goal of slowing the blockchain’s operations, and legitimate users are forced to either pay absurdly high fees to get their transactions through or wait until the attack subsides.

Another way an attacker could carry out a DDoS attack on a blockchain is through a smart contract. This only affects blockchain networks that support smart contracts Among these, different networks have different levels of resistance to this type of attack.

An attacker could carry out a DoS by sending a computationally intensive transaction to a smart contract. This could actively prevent other transactions from being included in the current block, thus having a similar result as transaction flooding. For example, each block on Ethereum has a gas block limit of 30mm gas, which is the total amount of gas that all transactions in that block can consume. More computationally expensive operations use more of this gas.

Blockchain DDoS attacks frequently happen, particularly on smaller blockchains, but not exclusively. Two large-scale incidents brought major blockchain networks to a grinding halt.

A system breach can significantly impair a company’s ability to operate. A few of the impacts caused by blockchain DDoS attacks include:

DDoS attacks on blockchain networks can cause the network to be severely congested, or worse, cause them to go offline for several hours. This can cause lasting damage to a blockchain’s credibility and reputation, and its users could look to alternative blockchain networks to use instead.

Generally, the more decentralized a blockchain network is, the better it is protected against DDoS attacks. However, achieving a high level of decentralization takes time.

Until then, implementing some of these measures will help mitigate your blockchain’s risk of being overwhelmed by DDoS attacks:

Related posts:

That was tough to want to even consider comprehending. What gives me the right to stir those kinds of thoughts and terrible emotions in your head? Pitchforks and torches arise. Finally, there’s a…

Mun Blockchain has the potential to revolutionize the global remittance market by offering a secure, efficient, and cost-effective way to transfer money across borders. With its unique features such…

Your market is heating up and you’ve never been more thrilled. But what most don’t think about is that the competition is excited, too! So, what do you do to keep your customer captivated when…