A report commissioned by the Pentagon concluded that the blockchains are not decentralized, vulnerable to attacks and are running outdated software:
- It would only take four entities to disrupt Bitcoin and only two to disrupt Ethereum.
- 60% of all Bitcoin traffic would move through just three ISPs (Internet Service Providers).
- Outdated and unencrypted software and blockchain protocols would also have been identified.
- According to Trail of Bits (report's author), ViaBTC, a leading global mining pool, would have assigned the password “123” to its accounts.
Pooling, another mining organization, does not even validate credentials at all, and Slushpool—which has mined more than 1.2 million Bitcoin since 2010—instructs users to ignore the password field. Combined, these three mining pools account for about 25% of the Bitcoin hash rate, or total computer power.
- Trail of Bits also warns that nodes can easily be deployed using inexpensive cloud servers, which can be used to flood the network in a Sybil attack. They presented evidence that a dense subnetwork of public nodes is largely responsible for reaching consensus and communicating with miners. An example of a Sybil attack would be linked to a malicious actor believed to be from Russia. The attacker gained control of up to 40% of Tor exit nodes and used them to rewrite Bitcoin traffic.
- Additionally, software errors and bugs are also a main security concern in the blockchain. Ideally, all nodes should operate under the same latest version of the software but that would not be the case... Software bugs would have already caused blockchain errors in Ethereum and 21% of Bitcoin nodes would be running an older version of the Bitcoin Core client, known to be vulnerable, according to Trail of Bits.
On one hand, we could argue that Crypto industry is still young, only thirteen years old, and that it is quite normal that there are still issues to be fixed. On the other hand, it is interesting to notice that these critical issues concern the two biggest cryptos, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), and not only the controversial projects like Solana (SOL). The recent crash of LUNA should remind us that this industry is still fragile and needs to be handled with caution.
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