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Re:Ethereum fixes serious “eclipse” flaw by gus_massa on Saturday March 03, 2018 @10:50AM (#16509754)
IIUC it's not a bug in the VM that is Turing complete and run the "smart contracts". The bug is in the surrounding code that tries to connect to the real network of the other Ethereum users and decides if the connection is trustworthy. So a similar attack could be run against other coins. [The article says that Bitcoin is safer, but the article doesn't explain why. Can someone give more details?]
Re:Ethereum fixes serious “eclipse” flaw by EthanHeilman on Saturday March 03, 2018 @11:42AM (#16510076)
>The article says that Bitcoin is safer, but the article doesn't explain why. Can someone give more details?

We wrote a paper [0] in 2015 performing eclipse attacks against Bitcoin. You can watch me talk about it here [1]. At the time it required an attacker with 400 IP addresses. Many of our countermeasures were adopted by Bitcoin-core raising the difficulty of the attack even further. In fact at this very moment I am still working on adding some of our countermeasures to Bitcoin-core [2].

In our attack on Ethereum, only 2 IP addreses were required. We discuss this in our paper:

>"We present new eclipse attacks showing that, prior to the disclosure of this work in January 2018, Ethereum’s peer-to-peer network was significantly less secure than that of Bitcoin. Our eclipse attackers need only control two machines, each with only a single IP address. [..] By contrast, the best known off-path eclipse attacks on Bitcoin [23] require the attacker to control hundreds of host machines, each with a distinct IP address. For most Internet users, it is far from trivial to obtain hundreds (or thousands) of IP addresses. This is why the Bitcoin eclipse attacker envisioned by [23] was a full-fledged botnet or Internet Service Provider, while the BGP-hijacker Bitcoin eclipse attacker envisioned by [17] needed access to a BGP-speaking core Internet router. By contrast, our attacks can be run by any kid with a machine and a script."

-Low-Resource Eclipse Attacks on Ethereum's Peer-to-Peer Network [3]

[0]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/263.pdf

[1]: https://www.usenix.org/node/190891

[2]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/9037

[3]: http://www.cs.bu.edu/~goldbe/projects/eclipseEth