Bijack: Breaking Bitcoin Network with TCP Vulnerabilities

Bijack: Breaking Bitcoin Network with TCP Vulnerabilities

연구 분야: Strategies

학회: European Symposium on Research in Computer Security

Recent studies have shown that compromising Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network is an effective way to disrupt the Bitcoin service. While many attack vectors have been uncovered such as BGP hijacking in the network layer and eclipse attack in the application layer, one significant attack vector that resides in the transport layer is largely overlooked. In this paper, we investigate the TCP vulnerabilities of the Bitcoin system and their consequences. We present Bijack, an off-path TCP hijacking attack on the Bitcoin network that is able to terminate Bitcoin connections or inject malicious data into the connections with only a few prior requirements and a limited amount of knowledge. This results in the Bitcoin network topology leakage, and the Bitcoin nodes isolation. We measured the real Bitcoin network and discovered that more than 1700 (27%) of the reachable Bitcoin nodes are vulnerable to our attack whose physical locations are spread across the world. We evaluated the efficiency and impacts of the Bijack attack in real-world settings, and the results show that Bijack successfully realizes several fatal Bitcoin attacks without too much effort.