Blockchains may be at higher risk of being controlled by a subset of participants than initially thought, according to a report commissioned by the United States Government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Distributed ledger technology and blockchains including Bitcoin and Ethereum may be more vulnerable to centralization risks than initially thought, according to Trail of Bits.its report titled “Are Blockchains Decentralized?”, which was commissioned by the U.S. Government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency .
Among its key findings, the security firm found that outdated Bitcoin nodes, unencrypted blockchain mining pools and a majority of unencrypted Bitcoin network traffic traversing over only a limited number of ISPs could leave room for various actors to garner excessive, centralized control over the network.
A Bitcoin node is any computer that stores and verifies blocks in the blockchain. Nodes are used to monitor the health and security of the Bitcoin blockchain and validate the accuracy of transactions. The current version all nodes should run isAnother takeaway from the report found that Bitcoin’s mining pool protocol Stratum is unencrypted and essentially unauthenticated.