Ethereum Classic (ETC) Labs has published a “Network Security Plan” that includes several immediate improvements as well as some long-term measures—going as far as switching to a new consensus algorithm—that could reinforce the blockchain’s security.
This comes just over two weeks after a hacker managed to steal roughly $7.3 million in crypto by conducting twoconsecutive 51% attacks on the Ethereum Classic blockchain.
A 51% attack is one of the most dangerous challenges a blockchainblockchain can face. During such assaults, a single party aims to seize 51%—or more—of a network’s hash power, which would grant the attackers control over the blockchain.
In the short term, ETC Labs plans to go ahead with a “Defensive Mining” plan that would require miners’ cooperation to maintain a more consistent hash ratehash rate and adjust it accordingly if needed.
To better detect potential attacks in the future, the developers will also monitor the network more closely to identify anomalies and spikes in hash rate. Another step is close coordination with exchanges that should result in the creation of a whitelist of addresses and confirmation times adjustment.
The ETC Core Team is also currently working on “Permapoint,” an arbitration system that should prevent chain reorganizations caused by 51% attacks when implemented.
A long road ahead
While these fixes will go some way to protecting the network, ETC Labs stated that the blockchain might need much greater fixes, to keep it safe in the long run. These ideas will require community consensus for them to be included in a network upgrade.
The first idea is PirlGuard, a protocol developed and proposed by the Pirl community. This uses so-called “penalty blocks” if a miner proposes a longer and heavier chain. The number of penalty blocks will depend on the number of original blocks that would be reverted if the network reorganizes, effectively doubling the cost of a potential 51% attack.
The recent Ethereum Classic 51% attack was far from an innocent mistake as some initially suspected, netting the attacker more than $5 million in stolen funds. What's more, the hacker only spent $200,000 to do it.
Bitquery, a blockchain data intelligence firm, released analysis today breaking down the steps the attacker took to pull off the 51% attack against the Ethereum Classic blockchain over the weekend.
Those steps reveal careful planning and an intimate knowledge of the Ethereum Classic bl...
“Another proposal is enhancing the chain with checkpointing and timestamping. This proposal would employ an external set of parties that securely run an assisting service that guarantees the ledger’s properties and can be relied upon at times when the invested hashing power is low,” ETC Labs added.
Third, Ethereum Classic might even completely switch from its current consensus algorithm Ethash (the same one that Ethereum is using) to a new one—if the community votes for it. Two protocols are currently listed as promising: Ethereum’s Keccak256 and RandomX.
ETC Labs added that while both algorithms are feasible, RandomX might not resolve the issues they are currently facing. Plus, switching to it could also mean that ETC will “step out of the shadow of the Ethereum network and into the shadow of the Monero network.”
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
Developers working on Ethereum are about to finalize two complementary standards that could solve one of the network's persistent user experience problems: how to clearly point to addresses across different chains.
"Users and apps need ways to unambiguously refer to an address on a specific chain," Wonderland, a multi-protocol team contributing to Ethereum and other decentralized networks, explained.
Right now, "there's no standard way for wallets, apps, or protocols to interpret or display thi...
The promise of free crypto in exchange for your biometric data is now live in the U.S., courtesy of World, the eyeball-scanning project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
It announced Wednesday that it is officially rolling out its orbs in six major American cities: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and San Francisco. While it toured its orbs around the U.S. in earlier promotional efforts, it stopped short of offering full services stateside.
The U.S. debut for World, formerly kn...
Cryptocurrencies have failed to deliver on their promises, cryptography pioneer Adi Shamir suggested at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday.
"My personal opinion is that the world would have been better without cryptocurrencies," he told attendees of an expert panel at the conference, per an initial report by The Register.
Shamir, co-inventor of the RSA encryption algorithm, was unequivocal about his position. While praising Satoshi Nakamoto's seminal whitepaper on Bitco...