Blockchain Communication Vulnerabilities

TL;DR

This paper empirically compares the vulnerabilities of communication protocols in five modern blockchains under various attack scenarios, revealing specific weaknesses for each protocol.

Contribution

It provides the first comparative analysis of multiple blockchain communication protocol vulnerabilities under adversarial conditions.

Findings

Algorand vulnerable to packet loss attacks

Aptos vulnerable to targeted load and leader isolation attacks

Avalanche vulnerable to transient failure attacks

Abstract

Blockchains are diverse in the way they handle communications between their nodes to disseminate information, mitigate attacks, and agree on the next block. While security vulnerabilities have been identified, they rely on an attack custom-made for a specific blockchain communication protocol. To our knowledge, the vulnerabilities of multiple blockchain communication protocols to adversarial conditions have never been compared. In this paper, we compare empirically the vulnerabilities of the communication protocols of five modern in-production blockchains, Algorand, Aptos, Avalanche, Redbelly and Solana, when attacked in five different ways. We conclude that Algorand is vulnerable to packet loss attacks, Aptos is vulnerable to targeted load attacks and leader isolation attacks, Avalanche is vulnerable to transient failure attacks, Redbelly's performance is impacted by packet loss attacks and Solana is vulnerable to stopping attacks and leader isolation attacks. Our system is open source.