Topics covered in this post include: 

• Why DDoS attacks are an issue 
• Some famous DDoS attacks that have happened before 
• Statistics that show they are on the rise 
• How blockchains are affected by them 
• The added benefit of anchoring on Accumulate

What Is A DDoS Attack?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a type of cyberattack where a hacker overwhelms a server with artificial traffic, making it difficult or impossible for normal users to visit the site. You can think of DDoS as a coordinated traffic jam. Normally, your ability to access a website is like driving down a highway – there are other cars on the road, but they don’t prevent you from getting where you are going.

With a DDoS attack, a hacker transforms that normal web traffic into rush hour traffic. The hacker, with the help of armies of bots, sends so much traffic to the website it creates the cyber equivalent of bumper-to-bumper traffic – blocking normal access to the site for hours or even days.

As these attacks look like normal web traffic, it is difficult to develop effective measures to combat them. Many of the solutions cybersecurity experts have invented are less than ideal and also impact their business’s bottom line. You’ve almost certainly been asked if you are a human or a robot when signing into a website.

Famous DDoS Attacks And Their Financial Implications

DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly common. Cisco estimated that there will be 15 million DDoS attacks annually by 2023. Even tech titans like Amazon are not immune to DDoS attacks. A client using Amazon Web Services, the most popular cloud service provider in the world that is responsible for hosting 40% of Ethereum nodes, was taken offline for 3 days by a DDoS attack in 2020. Since a single hour with a server offline can cost a company anywhere from $300,000-$1,000,000 – this attack had severe financial repercussions.

Speaking of financial implications, in 2012 six major banks were taken offline by repeated waves of DDoS attacks. Citibank, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Bank of America, and more were taken down by the assault. Millions of Americans were unable to access their bank accounts due to the cyber attack and it had severe consequences for businesses across the country.

DDOS Attacks Don’t Have to be Inevitable

You don’t have to be a giant corporation to suffer from DDoS attacks. Most of the 15 million annual attacks are targeted towards smaller businesses with less robust cybersecurity. Blockchains can also be hit with DDoS attacks.

Solana was taken offline at least twice by DDoS attacks. During one of these outages, which lasted 17 hours, Solana saw its network traffic and value diminish. The low cost of transactions on the Solana blockchain, normally a big benefit, allowed these attacks to occur. Solana can normally process 65,000 transactions a second, but hackers were sending upwards of 400,000 transactions a second across the chain – causing a backup that made normal operations impossible. Since this has happened to Solana more than once, some people speculate that Solana’s underlying cryptography may be flawed. To be fair, the Solana main net is still technically in beta mode. 

Measures can be taken for blockchains to mitigate against DDoS attacks. This is primarily due to the decentralized nature of blockchains. When there is one central server, it is easier to overwhelm it with traffic. When requests from the attack are distributed across a decentralized blockchain, a DDoS attack is less likely to create enough traffic to shut down an entire chain.

Accumulate’s architecture has measures in place to mitigate against these attacks. 

How Accumulate Can Mitigate DDoS Attacks

Accumulate was designed with security and verifiable identity in mind. The Accumulate blockchain can mitigate DDoS attacks because, rather than existing as a single contiguous blockchain, Accumulate is best conceptualized as a network of networks. Each of these networks has its own security and bandwidth and attacking all of them is much harder than attacking a single network.

Additionally, Accumulate requires fees to come from a signator, which makes identifying attackers easier.

How Accumulate aims to mitigate DDoS attack attempts:

• 1) Accumulate uses a two token system where we have ACME and Credits.  Credits provide security features and usability features.  They also allow the network to better identify attackers.  Attackers can still hide, but it is much more expensive and complicated.
• 2) Accumulate is a Network of Networks.  As Accumulate grows, more networks will be added, and the responsibilities for ADIs distributed over the networks. An attack that brings down some of the network will not bring down the whole network. And bringing a bit of the network back up is rather straight forward.

For additional security against DDoS attacks and other threats, Accumulate uses a cryptosecurity technique called anchoring. Anchoring is how Accumulate ties the networks together to create Accumulate’s Network of Networks.  The Backbone of Accumulate is the Directory Validator Network (DVN).  It accepts anchors from the Block Validator Nodes (BVNs) and constructs the blocks for Accumulate.  Users cannot send transactions to the DVN, so it is much harder to target with a DDOS. As long as the DVN keeps running, the BVNs can come back online and continue operations without losing data or state.

Anchoring on Accumulate’s Blockchain 

Anchoring in blockchain refers to when hashes from a private chain are embedded into a public chain so that the private chain can receive some of the advantages of the main chain while maintaining its sense of independent security. In other words, anchoring is beneficial because it minimizes vulnerability to 51% attacks by anchoring to other Layer 1 blockchains. Accumulate anchors to other blockchains like Bitcoin that have very high PoW security.  This applies Bitcoin’s security to the historical record of Accumulate. External anchors ensure that an attack does not alter the history of the Accumulate blockchain.

On Accumulate, the anchor chain is a Merkle tree maintained by the Blockchain Validator Network (BVN). There is an anchor collected any time that an account changes on a block. On Accumulate, the blockchain creates a summary hash of the entire network every second. 

The main benefit of anchoring is that it allows you to buy the security of a larger and more secure blockchain but only pay for a single transaction. 

With anchoring, both blockchains would need to be compromised by a DDoS to take both chains offline. Statistically speaking, this is a highly unlikely event given the robustness of the top Layer 1 protocols’ security and the additional security benefits that Accumulate offers. 

Anchoring was an innovation invented by Factom – which will soon upgrade to Accumulate. The cybersecurity innovations pioneered by Factom were capable enough to land Factom multiple government contracts, including with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Energy. These contracts speak volumes to the level of enterprises that trust the design of the blockchain, which is being significantly more improved under Accumulate. 

The Accumulate team has a wide range of innovative tools to use to increase security and resilience to attacks.  Accumulate is dedicated to make the most secure, performant blockchain for DApps, Enterprise, and your mom and pop.

Public-private key cryptography is a highly secure solution that enables a user on a blockchain to authorize a transaction from their wallet using a private key. 

This key is kept secret while being linked to one or multiple public keys, which are essentially like email addresses that can be openly shared and are used for sending and receiving information. 

Basically, the public key lets everyone know what your address is, while a private key allows you to verify that you own an address but without the need to reveal what the private key is. 

The private key acts as a tool for decrypting encrypted messages that are only meant for the intended recipient of the message. 

Data encryption is essentially the process of using mathematical computation to scramble an input of readable data into a seemingly random series of words, letters, and characters, which require a different type of mathematical computation to unscramble and recreate the readable data. 

For example, if Bob wants to send a message that is only intended for Alice to see, then Bob will use his public key to encrypt the message before delivering it to Alice’s public key. Alice’s public key is linked to a private key that only she has access to. 

In order to open the message, Alice must use her private key to decrypt the message, thus proving that she is the intended recipient of that message.

On a blockchain, this method of encrypting and decrypting messages using public-private key cryptography is how funds can be securely delivered to the right recipient knowing that they must hold the private keys in order to authorize those funds to be spent. 

Decrypting a blockchain message without private keys is an extremely difficult task for even the most sophisticated hackers. Even with the help of today’s supercomputers, it would take thousands of years to crack the code of a blockchain such as the Bitcoin network. 

However, with the advent of advanced technologies like Quantum Computing, the timeline for cracking the code that allows one to access another user’s private keys could shrink to a matter of minutes.

Blockchains Encryption Vulnerabilities

Bitcoin, which is widely regarded as the most secure blockchain, uses a hashing function and encryption algorithm to secure the chain. 

The hashing function, SHA256, is used to store the hash of a previous block unto a new block, thereby forming a chain and ensuring the network’s immutability. The encryption algorithm is called the Elliptical Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) which is used to validate that a transaction was signed by a private key that corresponds to the same public key that was shared by the counterparty in a transaction.  

While SHA256 is theorized to be more secure against attacks by quantum computers , ECDSA is not quantum-proof, meaning that with a Quantum computer, a hacker could reverse the elliptical curve algorithm to derive a private key simply by having access to the public key, allowing them to access the funds stored in that user’s digital wallet and decrypt any message sent to the wallet’s public key. 

How does Quantum Computing work? 

Quantum computing explores how to construct and manipulate data at a subatomic level, meaning structures that are smaller than atoms. When dealing with data at a subatomic level, the unit of measure is called a qubit (or quantum-bit). 

Quantum computers are being designed to be powerful enough to manipulate data stored on qubits. While the current generation of quantum computers can achieve a maximum of 54 qubits of power, it is estimated that at 4,000 qubits, a quantum computer would be able to perform calculations fast enough to crack the Bitcoin network’s elliptical curve algorithm. 

How does Accumulate overcome this challenge? 

Thankfully, the solution to designing a quantum-proof blockchain does not require building a more powerful machine than a quantum computer. Instead, a simpler solution is to ensure that public keys are managed in such a way that makes it impossible for a quantum computer to reliably steal anything of value by attacking one or even a set of public keys. 

As an example, imagine that you could store high-value items in a safety deposit box that also gives you the ability to constantly change the locks on a locker. You could require a different lock to access the same assets inside the locker, or a different set of keys for each new lock. 

Even if a bad actor was able to confiscate one of your keys, they would not be able to know if it would allow them to open the current lock or the previous one, making their attempts to steal your assets ultimately futile.

This is essentially what Accumulate offers with its intricate and customizable system for managing wallet keys. Users have access to a set of key books which reference multiple keys within a Key Page.

Keys can be arranged based on a set priority. For example, you can create high-priority keys that are placed in cold storage for use in case your other keys are lost or compromised. 

Beyond that, Accumulate’s key model could be upgraded with post-quantum cryptography when such technology becomes available and necessary. This would enable users to replace obsolete keys with keys that are quantum-proof.

Each account or sub-identity on the Accumulate network can be designated a specific key page. You can have a key page consisting of keys for highly important transactions such as moving funds on behalf of a DAO treasury of institutional clients and another key page for transactions of lower importance, such as testing newly deployed Defi smart contract. 

Key Books can also allow ADIs to update their security settings to include multisig or other conditions without having to touch high-priority keys, thereby maintaining the highest possible security standards and minimizing vulnerabilities. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, Accumulate is designing a new kind of address management system that makes blockchains quantum-proof. The process of assigning high-priority and low priority keys, while being able to update security settings from any address makes it significantly more difficult for a quantum computer to compromise a users wallet and steal their funds. 

Security on the blockchain is not just about the strength of the network’s cryptography, but also about minimizing single points of failure. Key pages effectively duplicate permissions and distribute the entry points that one needs to take in order to access their funds and authorize transactions. thereby making the process less prone to being exploited by hackers. 

As quantum computing continues to become more advanced, users who store their funds on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other popular blockchains would benefit greatly from adopting key pages as a way to mitigate the risk of loss in the event that their private keys are broken into by a quantum computer. 

The ability to alter what a specific private key is authorized to do on its own, or to effectively render a compromised private key useless by updating its security settings are important innovations developed by the Accumulate Network that will enable all blockchains to tackle any of the cybersecurity threats they may face down the road.