Re:Ethereum Goerli testnet merge goes live before move to pr...
by 3np on Thursday August 11, 2022 @11:41PM
(#32434491)
There must be some part of the attack I am missing here.
Let's say I'm an attacker and I do this. But now none of the subsequent blocks on the original chain will validate anymore because of hashes mismatching. I could of course validate new blocks but 6months+ of blocks from only one or a small number of validators (depending on how much validator capital one can amass for the attack) is going to be pretty obvious.
Unless the attacker can get a significant percentage of validators part of the attack, I can' see it work out in practice.
A long-range attack is when a validator withdrawals their stake, waits the withdrawal period (e.g. the 6 month delay delay mentions above), and then creates a fake chain starting from before they withdrew their staked eth.
Because in the "real" history (e.g. the ones that most nodes have seen over the past 6 months) the validator doesn't have Eth locked up still, there's no way to punish them. Thus, these long range attacks get very cheap (you could even imagine someone who pays validators for old keys -- aka, you don't even need to be a validator yourself).
These two facts together mean that PoS blockchains require some "weak subjectivity" - which pretty much means when you download and start syncing your node, you need to know a "finalized" block hash from the past 6 months (or within the withdrawal delay). This ensures you won't get tricked by a cheap long-range attack.
In practice, I don't think this will be much of a problem - clients can just do a new release with a new block has every few months for new users!