A junk transaction spam attack disrupted the Nano network. Node operators have limited their bandwidth, network synchronization is broken, and some transactions are blocked.
The Nano network uses so-called direct acyclic graphs (DAG) to settle transactions on the network, rather than the blockchain. Unlike blockchain, which is one unified and continuous transaction history, the Nano DAG ledger consists of many branches of asynchronous transaction histories. This design guarantees very low transaction fees. But, as evidenced by the latest attack, this comes at the expense of a decrease in decentralization and the level of resistance to Sibyl attacks.
On Thursday morning, on the Nano Discord channel, users complained about unconfirmed transactions and out of sync block explorers.
“I sent some NANO this morning. Nault [кошелек] reports a shipment, but the recipient has not yet confirmed the transaction. It usually takes a few minutes to translate, ”wrote one user on the Nano Discord support channel.
Another user who runs two separate Nano nodes noticed an inconsistency in the network data.
User complains about scattered data displayed by two nodes under his control (screenshot from Discord Nano channel)
According to a post on Reddit, the problems began when the Nano network was flooded with junk transactions with near-zero value. In response, Nano creator Colin LeMahieu advised node operators to lower their bandwidth to accept fewer incoming transactions. This caused the network to nearly stop working, as one Nano user hanzyfranzy writes:
“The global Nano network is down. This is probably not likely to change until the node operators change their configurations. Some transactions go through, but this is just a drop in the ocean. ”
Colin LeMahier said the nodes were out of sync due to an attack that exposed “CPU and disk usage limits” for the nodes.
“Lowering the bandwidth limit conserves disk and processor resources so they can sync. The network was running at 70 transactions per second for over a week and the nodes stopped syncing. When network participants lower their bandwidth limit, it slows down the speed of transaction processing and allows them to catch up. Unfortunately, an attacker took advantage of this state of the nodes, so re-synchronization is slow, ”LeMahier said.
LeMahier believes the attackers have targeted the Nano in order to release version 22, which a team of five is working on. The attackers have stopped the attack at the moment, and LeMahier said that the network is “slowly recovering”, but did not name the timeline for full restoration of its normal operation.
As a reminder, last summer a spam attack was carried out on the Chainlink price oracle network – attackers generated a lot of requests to network nodes to cause interruptions in work. In August 2018, a spam attack on the Ethereum network resulted in transaction delays.
Veterans of the cryptocurrency community remember well a series of spam attacks on the Bitcoin network in 2015-2016, when tens and even hundreds of thousands of “junk” transactions filled all blocks, causing delays in transactions of ordinary users and a multiple increase in network fees.
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