Ethereum Proof-of-Stake attack and defense
AI summary of the linked articleEthereum.org's page on proof-of-stake attacks and defenses outlines the attack vectors against Ethereum's consensus layer and how they can be countered. It says attackers realistically target three outcomes: reorgs, double finality, or finality delay, since they cannot mint ether or drain arbitrary accounts. Neuder et al. (2020) showed a validator can withhold a block and attestations to trigger a one-block ex ante reorg, a attack first described with a 30% stake and later shown viable with 2% of total stake. Balancing and bouncing attacks can halt finality by splitting honest validators, and the protocol counters them with proposer-weight boosting and changes to the fork-choice algorithm. |
1 comment macbudkowski.ethSubmitter I recall Vitalik saying that if a nation state wanted to attack Ethereum, it'd probably attack the social layer as it's much cheaper. Here's a good write-up of how it could work. |