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

Cyber Threat Intelligence for SOC Analysts

Nidhi Rastogi, Md Tanvirul Alam (Rochester Institute of Technology)

Read More

Anomaly Detection in the Open World: Normality Shift Detection,...

Dongqi Han (Tsinghua University), Zhiliang Wang (Tsinghua University), Wenqi Chen (Tsinghua University), Kai Wang (Tsinghua University), Rui Yu (Tsinghua University), Su Wang (Tsinghua University), Han Zhang (Tsinghua University), Zhihua Wang (State Grid Shanghai Municipal Electric Power Company), Minghui Jin (State Grid Shanghai Municipal Electric Power Company), Jiahai Yang (Tsinghua University), Xingang Shi (Tsinghua University), Xia…

Read More

MetaWave: Attacking mmWave Sensing with Meta-material-enhanced Tags

Xingyu Chen (University of Colorado Denver), Zhengxiong Li (University of Colorado Denver), Baicheng Chen (University of California San Diego), Yi Zhu (SUNY at Buffalo), Chris Xiaoxuan Lu (University of Edinburgh), Zhengyu Peng (Aptiv), Feng Lin (Zhejiang University), Wenyao Xu (SUNY Buffalo), Kui Ren (Zhejiang University), Chunming Qiao (SUNY at Buffalo)

Read More

Breaking and Fixing Virtual Channels: Domino Attack and Donner

Lukas Aumayr (TU Wien), Pedro Moreno-Sanchez (IMDEA Software Institute), Aniket Kate (Purdue University / Supra), Matteo Maffei (Christian Doppler Laboratory Blockchain Technologies for the Internet of Things / TU Wien)

Read More