A hostile actor may use an eclipse assault, which is a fairly straightforward attack, to interfere with network nodes. The assault, as its name suggests, seeks to obstruct a user's vision of the peer-to-peer network in order to disrupt it generally or to set up more sophisticated attacks.
On the surface, Eclipse attacks may resemble Sybil attacks. While they do have certain things in common—the malicious actor will flood the network with phony peers—their ultimate objectives are distinct. An eclipse assault targets a single node (for reasons mentioned in a later section), but a Sybil attack targets the entire network in an effort to manipulate the protocol's reputational structure.
The idea is covered in depth in the 2015 paper Eclipse assaults on Bitcoin's Peer-to-Peer Network, which was written by researchers from Hebrew University and Boston University. They detail their findings from conducting eclipse assaults and propose potential defenses.
While non-mining (or full) nodes can readily run on low computing power, bitcoin miners need specialized equipment in order to create new blocks. This helps Bitcoin become more decentralized because anyone can start a node on a low-end device. To stay in sync with the network, the software keeps a database of transactions that it syncs with its immediate peers.
The bandwidth of multiple nodes is a limiting constraint. The Bitcoin software has some restrictions (it only allows a maximum of 125 connections), so even though there are a ton of devices running it, the average device cannot connect directly to many of them.
The malicious actor will make sure that all of the target's connections are made to nodes under their control in an eclipse attack. The attacker will initially bombard the target with its own IP addresses, which the victim's software restart is likely to connect to. An attacker can either wait for a restart to happen naturally or force one (by attacking the target with a DDoS attack).
Once this has happened, the unwary victim is at the mercy of the rogue nodes; without a perspective of the larger network, they are vulnerable to the attacker feeding them false information.
Peer-to-peer networks are the target of eclipse assaults. They can be a bit of a hassle when used as a solitary strike. Their real power comes from amplifying other attacks that damage targets monetarily or provide the attacker an edge in mining.
Although there haven't been any significant effects of an eclipse attack in the wild yet, the threat still exists despite the network's built-in defenses. The best security will be one that makes it financially impossible for bad actors to undertake any of the attack avenues that are available for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/what-is-an-eclipse-attack?utm_campaign=web_share_link