I saw this on Twitter and was wondering if anyone could help me understand?
"For everybody holding #Darkcoin - Google 'Sybil Attack'"
I don't have the technical background to understand a Sybil Attack. Could someone explain this to me and if it negatively impacts DarkCoin's future at all? Might end up being nothing but I would like to know.
Basically a Sybil Attack is an attack on peer-to-Peer network in which the attacker uses multiple nodes to establish that they are "trustworthy" and then proceeds to use that node "trust" to influence the network in some way. The type of influence depends on what type of network it is that is being attacked - it might be just disruption, injection of bad data , or capturing other user and/or node information.
The name Sybil refers to the girl with multiple personalities.
I'm not sure how this would affect the Darkcoin network, except that a 51% attack is somewhat the same principle.
In the standard sybil attack a user can make many fake identifies and actually de-anonymize a transaction. There's a few tools DarkSend uses to protect against this type of attack, from the whitepaper:
A scheme using blind signatures is implemented to prove the provided outputs belong to one of
the participants of the pool. Using this strategy neither the master nor other nodes know which
outputs belong to which inputs (
http://ojs.academypublisher.com/index.php/jnw/article/viewFile/0508921928/2053)
Improved Pool Anonymity
Users who want to increase the anonymity of the pools can run scripts to “push” DarkSend
transactions through the pool by sending money to themselves with DarkSend. This will allow
them to take up a space in the pool to ensure the anonymity of other users. If enough users run
scripts like this one, the speed of transactions and the anonymity of the network will be
increased.
---
So some users will run a script to "push" transactions through the pool creating extra entropy.
For example, say we have a pool with 15 spots:
-- User A takes 1 spot
-- The bad actor takes 11 spots
-- We have 3 nodes running that script
In that case the bad actor can't tell the difference between the 4 other nodes.
