Developer Anish Agnihotri demonstrated what a 51% attack on the blockchain looks like. He recorded a video of the attack on the CheapETH clone of the Ethereum network and published it for “educational purposes.”
Anish Agnihotri, an eighteen-year-old intern at venture capital firm Polychain Capital, demonstrated how a 51% attack on blockchain works. It wrote on the social network Twitter:
“I’ve never seen a 51% attack on a live network. I suppose there are good reasons for this – most people who attack networks for monetary gain are probably not willing to advertise themselves. So I wrote it down for you. ”
51% attack is one of the ways to attack the blockchain. As long as most of the hashing power of a blockchain is controlled by rules-compliant actors seeking to support the network, it will work fine. But if an attacker takes control of most of the hashing power, they can cause problems on the network.
One of the main ways to profit from a 51% attack is double spending. By taking control of most of the hashing power, an attacker secretly mines a longer alternate version of the chain. He then deposits a cryptocurrency exchange and increases the balance. After that, it broadcasts its alternate and longer chain to the network, destroying its previous transaction. This allows him to keep the initial money and deposit on the exchange.
Agnihotri chose a tiny clone of the Ethereum blockchain called CheapETH to conduct an experiment. It has a much larger block size, which makes it cheaper to send transactions. While Ethereum’s hash rate reaches 616 Tx / s, CheapETH’s hash power does not exceed 559 Mh / s, which makes it more vulnerable to attacks.
To carry out the attack, Agnihotri rented a hashing power of 1.44 Gh / s. This allowed him to take control of about 72% of the network hashrate. He also rented a virtual machine to run the blockchain. General expenses were less than $ 100.
The video shows how he attacked the network. Agnihotri explainedthat he went offline, mined alone in his own pool for a few minutes, and then broadcast a longer version of the chain to the network. Shortly thereafter, the block guides were updated to show that he had mined all the last blocks.
During the attack on the network, Agnihotri did not double-spend. In the video description, he indicates the points at which an attacker could perform a double spend attack. Later he stated, which will distribute tokens for free to any pools affected by his attack.
Recall that last fall, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said that a 51% attack on Ethereum 2.0 – the second version of the network – would not be fatal.
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