An eclipse attack is a network-level attack on a blockchain, where an attacker essentially takes control of the peer-to-peer network, obscuring a node’s view of the blockchain.
In a new paper titled “Low-Resource Eclipse Attacks on Ethereum’s Peer-to-Peer Network,” Sharon Goldberg, an associate professor at Boston University; Ethan Heilman, a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University; and Yuval Marcus, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, describe a way to carry out an eclipse attack on the Ethereum network.
(The researchers disclosed their attacks to Ethereum on January 9, 2018, and Ethereum developers have already issued a patch — Geth v1.8.1 — to fix the network.)
In speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, Goldberg explained the research, how it compares to Bitcoin eclipse attacks and why she thinks the work is important.
