Ethereum Network Overcame The Intentional Parity Nodes Attack

The Ethereum network overcame the intentional attack on its parity nodes that occurred today, according to several analysts. As the ETH news now show, there are reports that some Parity Ethereum nodes lost sync with the network.

In fact, the core blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technology recently noted that it believed there was an attack underway and subsequently released network upgrades in order to protect against it. According to the cryptocurrency security consultant named Sergio Demian, the Ethereum network overcame the attack which was implemented in a simple way. As he described it:

“You send to a Parity node a block with invalid transactions, but valid header (borrowed from another block). The node will mark the block header as invalid and ban this block header forever but the header is still valid.”

Another software developer named Liam Aharon also analyzed the attack and concluded that it was close to taking down the entire network. He also said that as the Ethereum network overcame this attack, it could be much more vulnerable to similar attacks in the upcoming year.

As per Aharon, the attack did not manage to bring down the entire network mainly because it has a client dubbed Geth, which is immune to attack. Still, if we take into account Parity and its intention to transition Parity Ethereum to DAO ownership and maintainer model, Geth could certainly be the only well-maintained client in 2020 as he said.

““If this scenario came true, attacks similar to today’s would devastate the network, instead of just being inconvenient,’ Aharon said.

Meanwhile, the past year has shown us that Parity released multiple updates geared to fixing node vulnerability. In March this year, the CEO Jutta Steiner said that the new controversial Create2 Ethereum function would have prevented the Parity multisig feature following one incident when a user “accidentally killed” the multisig library by activating a vulnerability to become the owner of the library – and then self-destructing it.

In May this year, a global hacking research collective named SRLabs claimed that only two thirds of the ETH client software that ran on Ethereum nodes had been patched against a critical security flow.