Hwanjo Heo (ETRI), Seungwon Woo (ETRI/KAIST), Taeung Yoon (KAIST), Min Suk Kang (KAIST), Seungwon Shin (KAIST)

We present a practical partitioning attack, which we call Gethlighting, that isolates an Ethereum full node from the rest of the network for hours without having to occupy (or eclipse) all of the target’s peer connections. In Gethlighting, an adversary controls only about a half (e.g., 25 out of total 50) of all peer connections of a target node, achieving powerful partitioning with a small attack budget of operating several inexpensive virtual machines. At the core of Gethlighting, its low-rate denial-of-service (DoS) strategy effectively stops the growth of local blockchain for hours while leaving other Ethereum node operations undisturbed. We analyze how subtle and insignificant delays incurred by a low-rate DoS can lead to a powerful blockchain partitioning attack. The practical impact of Gethlighting is discussed — i.e., the attack is scalable and low-cost (only about $5,714 for targeting all Ethereum full nodes concurrently for 24 hours), and extremely simple to launch. We demonstrate the feasibility of Gethlighting with full nodes in the Ethereum mainnet and testnet in both controlled and real-world experiments. We identify a number of fundamental system characteristics in Ethereum that enable Gethlighting attacks and propose countermeasures that require some protocol and client implementation enhancements. Ethereum Foundation has acknowledged this vulnerability in September 2022 and one of our countermeasures has been accepted as a hotfix for Geth 1.11.0.

View More Papers

AuthentiSense: A Scalable Behavioral Biometrics Authentication Scheme using Few-Shot...

Hossein Fereidooni (Technical University of Darmstadt), Jan Koenig (University of Wuerzburg), Phillip Rieger (Technical University of Darmstadt), Marco Chilese (Technical University of Darmstadt), Bora Goekbakan (KOBIL, Germany), Moritz Finke (University of Wuerzburg), Alexandra Dmitrienko (University of Wuerzburg), Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (Technical University of Darmstadt)

Read More

CableAuth: A Biometric Second Factor Authentication Scheme for Electric...

Jack Sturgess, Sebastian Köhler, Simon Birnbach, Ivan Martinovic (University of Oxford)

Read More

VulHawk: Cross-architecture Vulnerability Detection with Entropy-based Binary Code Search

Zhenhao Luo (College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology), Pengfei Wang (College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology), Baosheng Wang (College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology), Yong Tang (College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology), Wei Xie (College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology), Xu Zhou (College of Computer,…

Read More

“This is different from the Western world”: Understanding Password...

Aniqa Alam, Elizabeth Stobert, Robert Biddle (Carleton University)

Read More