Detectable, Traceable, and Manageable Blockchain Technologies BHE: An Attack Scheme against Bitcoin P2P Network

Abstract

As the most successful cryptocurrency, bitcoin has become the primary target of attackers. The security risks existing in bitcoin network (P2P networks) may pose serious threats to itself. It has been proved that network attackers of the autonomous system level could isolate a specific set of bitcoin nodes using prefix hijacking attacks; since this attack achieves bitcoin partition by deleting all data packets of the victim node, it is easy to be discovered by the victim node, and cannot maintain a long-term connection (the partition will disappear after canceling the BGP hijacking) (Apostolaki M et al. (2017)). This paper proposes a new attack scheme—eclipse attack method based on BGP hijacking (BHE). The attack can occupy the network connection of the victim node, and only need to delete part of the TCP handshaking packets of the victim node during the attack, and it makes the attack more hidden and can occupy the network connection of the victim node for a long time. The innovation of the BHE attack is that it can control the peering decision of the victim node by controlling the victim node’s internal peer database (new table and tried table) and preventing the victim node from establishing a good connection. It enables the attacker to occupy all network connections of the victim node and become its natural network middleman. We verify the feasibility of the BHE attack through experimental evaluation and demonstrate that an attacker who can launch BGP hijacking may occupy all connections of the victim node within 20 minutes (ignoring the time of traffic diversion). To reduce the attack’s impact, the paper provides some countermeasures that can use in practice according to the basic characteristics of the attack.