An unknown attacker attempted an unsuccessful Sybil attack on Monero’s network, according to Riccardo ‘Fluffypony’ Spagni, a former Monero maintainer.
Recently, a largely incompetent attacker bumbled their way through a Sybil attack against Monero, trying to correlate transactions to the IP address of the node that broadcast it. Whilst novel in that it is the 1st Sybil attack of this sort, it was also quite ineffective. 1/n
— Riccardo Spagni (@fluffypony) November 10, 2020
According to Spagni, the attacker attempted to correlate the IP addresses of nodes broadcasting transactions. However, the attack did not disrupt Monero’s privacy-preserving mechanisms.
First off, this clumsy attack had no effect on any of Monero’s on-chain privacy mechanisms (ring signatures, stealth addresses, confidential transactions). Additionally, it is important to note that this is an attack that you could execute against nearly every cryptocurrency, 2/n
— Riccardo Spagni (@fluffypony) November 10, 2020
“Dandelion++ works by randomly ‘diffusing’ transaction broadcasts. This means that for a Sybil attack to link a transaction to a node’s IP address, it has to be intercepted at the very first node,” wrote Spagni.
He advised users concerned about Sybil attacks to broadcast transactions via Tor.
Earlier in November, the main Tron network was subjected to a large-scale attack. Justin Sun, head of the project, said that the attacker exploited contract-developer privileges and initiated malicious transactions.
Subscribe to ForkLog news on Facebook!