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DDoS: A Missile Of Mass Destruction In Blockchain
By Sandeep Kasalkar
A DDoS assault, short for “distributed denial-of-service,” is a malicious effort to stop a server, service, or network’s regular activity by saturating the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a torrent of Internet traffic.
DDoS Attacks on Blockchain
The blockchain is a distributed network and has safeguards in place to ensure that transactions can continue even if some nodes go offline for a period of time. Blockchain nodes are network stakeholders, and their devices are authorized to keep track of the distributed ledger and serve as communication hubs for various network tasks. A blockchain node’s primary job is to confirm the legality of each subsequent batch of network transactions, known as blocks.
Any node can fail due to a DDoS attack or other event without taking over the entire network.
Not all blockchain networks are created equal, and the robustness of any given blockchain network is highly dependent on the number of nodes & diversity. It is impossible to list every method by which a blockchain network can be targeted for a DDoS attack.
How is a DDoS Attack executed
DDoS attacks can be carried out in two ways:
1. Using transaction flooding:
Transaction flooding is one of the main DDoS attacks in blockchain technology. A hacker may jeopardise the accessibility for authorised (original) users due to the flood of spam and fake transactions, among other unpleasant effects on the network.
There is a definite, predetermined capacity for blockchains. This is because they consistently produce new blocks with a set maximum size. Any transaction that isn’t included in the current block will be kept in the Mempool and added in the following block. A mempool is an organized queue where transactions are stored and sorted before being added to a newly created block.
Any malevolent attacker can cause permitted transactions to spend a lot of time in the Mempool by sending many transactions to the blockchain network, filling the entire block with fake or spam transactions. Therefore, if genuine transactions aren’t included in blocks, they won’t be added to the ledger, which will prevent Blockchain from functioning properly.
2. Smart contract-based attacks
A smart contract may be the target of a DDoS assault in several different ways, including:
- If an attacker submits a transaction to a smart contract that requires a lot of computation, it really stops further transactions from being added to the current block.
- Another strategy is to design a parasitic contract that automatically consumes all the gas, making the service unavailable to other users.
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