ledgerloops / ledgerloops-whitepaper

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the make-other-loopId-look-bad attack #12

Closed michielbdejong closed 6 years ago

michielbdejong commented 6 years ago

This may seem far-fetched but I do think it applies:

Suppose loopId's have long been established, and two loops are competing with each other over a shared sections:

  <<<<<<
v        ^
v loop 1 ^
v        ^
  >>>>>>         <- shared section
^        v
^ loop 2 v
^        v
  <<<<<<

A node that's part of loop 1 could spam fake packets with loopId 2 into the shared section, thus making loopId 2 almost unusable, and directing more traffic to itself.

This is the equivalent of the 'make your competitor look bad' attack which is a known problem in Interledger connector design.

I can think of two ways to solve it:

Since LedgerLoops is designed from scratch (not on top of existing ledgers which may support hashlock checks but not signature checks), I think for LedgerLoops the second option is better. (for Interledger, I could imagine the first option turns out to be better).