Ethereum Network Comes Across to Yet Another DOS Attack

Ethereum Network Comes Across Yet Another DOS Attack

Gautham

Last Updated: September 23, 2016 10:39 am

2 mins read

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Ethereum is definitely heading towards trouble. The promising blockchain-based smart contracts protocol has been facing a lot of issues in the recent days, the latest one being yet another DOS attack.

A brief alert about the latest DOS attack was published earlier yesterday on Ethereum’s blog. The alert statement reads,

“URGENT ALL MINERS: The network is under attack. …a computational DDoS, i.e. miners and nodes need to spend a very long time processing some blocks. …due to the EXTCODESIZE opcode, which has a fairly low gas price but which requires nodes to read state information from disk; the attack transactions are calling this opcode roughly 50,000 times per block. “

In the blog post, Ethereum co-founder Jeffrey Wilcke ensures that the effect of DOS attack is limited to network slowdown, and that there has been no consensus failure or memory overload due to the attack. He also recommends the miners to switch from Geth mining to Parity mining to avoid the issue.

The previous DOS attack saw Ethereum developers fix the issue. However, the consecutiveness between the two attacks make one reconsider whether blockchain technology applications are mature enough to be used by mainstream banking and financial sectors.

Ethereum already has the failure of DAO to its credit. By focusing on DAO, in an attempt to raise more funds, they have already discredited the system. It has already resulted in Ethereum introducing a hard fork which led to the creation of two versions of cryptocurrency – Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

Ethereum Foundation’s shifted focus from Ethereum protocol to development and implementation of DAO received flak from various quarters, including Anthony Di Iorio who happens to be the founding member of Ethereum as well. It is high time for Ethereum to wake up and ensure that the platform delivers what it promises before the repercussions affect the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Ref: Ethereum Blog | Image: Wallpaper Craze

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