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Tell HN: Executing a 51% attack on a real live CryptoCurrency, livestream

170 points by piracy1 ↗ HN
Hey all, On Oct 13, 3:00 CDT, 4:00 EDT 1:00 PST I'm going to do a 51% attack against the cryptocurrency Einsteinium (i'll do the biggest, most established coin I can afford to attack, I'm putting in $50 of my money and if you want to donate you can 18YvVAxEMYxowSYEmWVtY75ZUdKXXk2vQc (If that's against the rules feel free to remove it Admins)) :

1. Demonstrate how easy these attacks are for anyone to do. 2. Generally teach people about the nuts and bolts of these attacks and potential mitigations.

If you want to watch it, https://www.twitch.tv/geocold

Event link: https://www.twitch.tv/events/NyJSsF3hQkGHdnsKA2f4JQ

75 comments

[ 15.0 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] thread
piracy1
Feel free to ask me any questions, I'll try to answer them all.
ersiees
What these attacks are about is stealing money, right? Is that your plan? Why do you want donations to steal something or if you don’t steal anything how will you change the chain?
piracy1
Generally, an attacker would deposit money in an exchange, exchange that money, withdraw it, then overwrite the transaction. I don't plan to do this. I'll either just do the overwriting part or just deposit like a dollar and not exchange or withdraw it. This is meant to just be educational.
tomglynch
I understand you're doing it to be educational - though what stops someone else taking advantage of your 51% attack and performing a double spend?
ema
Nothing really. Except since this 51% attack is pre-announced people can choose to not accept any transaction as confirmed until the attack is over.
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[dead] gunlaw22
Is this posted for a quick p and d scheme?
F_r_k
What time UTC ?
raws
8:00 PM UTC
jwilk
Why PM?
zamadatix
Because that's when it is?
jwilk
Yeah, but how was that conclusion reached?

3:00 CDT = 8:00 UTC, but the original post didn't mention AM or PM.

Is PM the default in US?

zamadatix
The event link from the original post says:

DATE & TIME Saturday, Oct 13 4:00 PM EDT

But yes, generally 4 AM isn't the most common stream start time :).

ralexstokes
Do you have an estimate for how expensive the attack will be?

Are you renting hardware from the cloud?

Any chance they will hardfork before you can attack?

piracy1
I'm not 100% sure what coin i'll attack. If people donate I might try for Vertcoin which will be $300-500 to attack. But if I stick with Einsteinium it will be very cheap, maybe $20-40. They could hardfork but I doubt they will. It's also sort of hard to implement a solution that quickly.
dannyw
How about Bytecoin? I’m sure if you post an address you’ll get more than you spend in donations.
piracy1
Bytecoin would take maybe a thousand, 4 or 5 if we want to get a transaction confirmed in an exchange. I'll do the biggest coin I can I'll put in $50 of my own money If anyone wants to donate you can: bitcoin:18YvVAxEMYxowSYEmWVtY75ZUdKXXk2vQc
akerro
https://www.crypto51.app/

https://www.crypto51.app/coins/EMC2.html

piracy1
A great site. I made a version of it in python a while back and wanted to turn it into a website but never got around to it. Glad they did it for me but a lil sad I never got the media attention it got :(
giancarlostoro
Try CherryPy if you want to turn python code into a website.
piracy1
Thanks for the recommendation. For me, making it wasn't the hard part, the procrastination was.
giancarlostoro
No problem, I recommend it cause CherryPy will take any object oriented application and turn it into a website, you could make it all RESTful if it makes it easier and just have a jquery ajax client or something to make it stupid simple. Been using CherryPy for years and happy with it.
hobofan
A 51% attack against small blockchains is like taking a lollipop from a toddler.
knocte
A smaller blockchain might seem like a toddler compared to the big old bitcoin, however you shouldn't dismiss that the biggest shitcoins in market capitalization have a decent amount of people invested in them.

Take in account a 51% attack causes a double-spend. A double-spend targetting a transaction of a big amount costs the same as if you target a transaction of a small amount. This means that whoever performs this attack could just wait until the perfect victim comes in (think: a big transaction from/to a hotwallet of a big exchange).

This, in the end, could cause a big loss to some user of the exchange (especially if the exchange doesn't take responsibility for the issue); which could mean a lot more value than a lollipop.

Key takeaway from this IMO: don't invest in shitcoins, err.. altcoins sorry.

piracy1
^ This. Also, I agree that it's fairly trivial. That is the point, I want to show people how easy it is and maybe prompt developers to implement mitigations. I also just want to talk about 51% attacks because I think they're neat.
ghayes
You should demonstrate an effective use of double-spend in your 51% attack, since there’s a lot of FUD around what can happen with a 51% attack. As in, people may assume you can drain accounts with 51% control, as opposed to double-spend transactions that did not yet hit high confirmation counts.
piracy1
" As in, people may assume you can drain accounts with 51% control" This is categorically incorrect. I'll make sure to mention that.
stale2002
> This, in the end, could cause a big loss to some user of the exchange

Not really. If someone is worried about a double spend attack, all they have to do is require a larger number of confirmations, until they are satisfied with the amount of security, for the given value of the transaction that they are accepting.

For example, if a big exchange is accepting a million dollars worth of crypto, they might want to wait a very long time, in order to be absolutely sure.

If someone is instead accepting payment for coffee, they could be perfectly happy to accept more risk.

cm2187
Then it means small blockchains aren't fit for purpose.
piracy1
There are some ways to fix it and it's a fairly interesting problem. But yes, many are potentially dysfunctional due to this and it brings up some points about inherent weaknesses of small blockchains as they presently exist.
retox
Too big to fail vs too small to succeed?
saagarjha
Have you every tried taking candy from a toddler? It’s not easy ;)
jwilk
CDT, EDT, PST? I have no idea what this means.

Please don't use time zone abbreviations. They are neither human- nor machine-readable.

piracy1
Central Daylight Time, Eastern Daylight Time, Pacific Standard Time.
jwilk
These names are still meaningless outside USA.
[dead] rstrstrst
Did the EU already ban Google?
technion
Australians have an Eastern Daylight Time is probably not what is being referred so. I'm assuming other countries do too.
joshschreuder
It’s typically referred to as AEDST though
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thomasfoster96
Only during daylight savings time, otherwise it’s AEST or less commonly AEDT. Or even EST.
dmos62
I'm happy EU is at least getting rid of daylight time saving.
gadrev
We'll see. For example, Portugal has already said they will keep DST despite what EU decides. They already tried removing DST in the 90s and most people there disliked it.
mchannon
Over half the HN readership lives in areas where these abbreviations are human-readable. And 100% can google the abbreviations. Would it be better if we started using UTC+5, etc.? Sure. But good luck getting Americans to change. If the OP's European counterpart posted a time in "CET" I'd have to go look it up, and I'd be fine doing that if it was important to me, rather than pointing the finger and crying Eurocentrism.

What I did find objectionable about the times, though, was the lack of "AM" or "PM". In the US, 3:00 might be in the morning or the afternoon, and the context does not make it clear which is intended.

mirages
Never heard about CET before you mentionned it and I'm european
ziomanzo
lol, I taught you were gonna show us how it works on some testnet. If you are for real, this will be very educational! tell us every detail please! The costs, hashpower, what exactly are you going to do? double spend?...
ziomanzo
or you are trying to hack us? with creating an account?
Havoc
Isn't that kinda mean towards whoever set up the coin?

Not saying don't do it...bit think it might ruin someone's day even if it is intended as educational

ema
I think how to judge this attack depends on how the coin presents itself. If they're clear about being in a phase of the project where such attacks are feasible then it's just vandalism, but if they're presenting a more flattering image of their project then demonstrating a 51% attack is a service to the public.
throwawaylolx
If they are in that phase, then they shouldn't be on exchanges.
Rainymood
I probably do not understand enough of the blockchain technology but you announcing this ... why can't they ramp up their security?
Improvotter
Because in order to "ramp up their security", they'd need more users which makes this attack harder. Security isn't like a knob that you turn.
lalaland1125
You actually can increase security in a straightforward manner. Just increase the mining rewards and pay for it with inflation.
throwawaylolx
They can just rent more hash power than OP during the live stream.
tgsovlerkhgsel
The security of proof-of-work based blockchains (which most of them are) is based on the assumption that the majority of participating nodes (or rather miners) as measured by the work they do, i.e. computing power, are honest.

Attacking a big, established blockchain like Bitcoin would require you to get more mining power than the rest of the network, which means massive datacenters of special purpose hardware.

Attacking a small blockchain still requires you to get more mining power than the rest of the network, but since there are not too many miners, you can rent enough mining power to have more than the rest of the network for an affordable price.

rrssh
In the process, the attacker will legitimately get some currency, which is supposed to incentivize them to not actually attack the network, because it will affect the value of the coins they got − that's it, that's the only protection.
chris_mc
Isn't this massively illegal? You're basically DoSing a network. Possibly theft as well!
saagarjha
Why would it be? You’re just mining like any other person, except you’re doing it faster than anyone else. I think the poster has mentioned that this is purely for educational purposes; they’re not trying to steal everyone else’s money.
koolba
On the contrary, you're contributing to the success of the coin by dedicating your personal resources to increase the total hash rate. It's not a denial of service, it's explicitly providing the mining service that the coin is asking it's participants to provide.

Now using that temporary hash rate imbalance to issue an explicit double spend attack could be considered fraud. But that's a totally separate.

paulcole
Try calling the cops about a 51% attack on your Einsteinium and see what happens lol.
jeanlucas
Finally someone can prove those claims of how much it costs, if this is legit.
zhte415
I think you've already done it. A central bank cannot run a blockchain level of trust that is smaller than they are. And nor can shipping companies, and basically anyone.

If you're not sure another party isn't in control of the 51% of the chain, nothing is safe.

loceng
Which then requires a centralized authority, of members who trust the systems/processes and people in place, if going to use blockchain technology..
jamieweb
What are you going to stream? Setting up the miners physically or a screencast of the configuration? Or something else?
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applelover
will it be pumpped during attacking?
copex
Can't we take profit too with this attack? It would affect the whole blockchain, so we can also send an amount of that coin to an exchange when you start the fork. Then we will have the amount restored when the fork becomes the real of the coin.