delvingbitcoin

Zawy’s Alternating Timestamp Attack

Zawy’s Alternating Timestamp Attack

Original Postby David Harding

Posted on: August 21, 2024 14:52 UTC

Understanding the mechanics of blockchain difficulty adjustment and its exploitation through timing manipulation reveals a nuanced strategy for maintaining attack viability.

The core of this approach lies in the deliberate alternation between periods of increased and decreased mining difficulty to sustain an abnormally high block production rate without breaching network time protocol rules.

Initially, the attacker enhances the blockchain's difficulty by adhering to normal timestamp rules for a set period, leading to a fourfold increase in mining difficulty. This is strategically followed by two periods where the difficulty is significantly reduced - cumulatively by a factor of 1/16th - through the manipulation of block timestamps. This pattern of alternating difficulty levels allows the attacker to lower the overall mining difficulty to a point where producing six blocks per second becomes feasible. This rate represents the upper limit before the Mean Time to Produce (MTP) accelerates faster than real-world time, which would trigger network safeguards against such rapid progression.

The crux of the strategy hinges on the manipulation of specific block timestamps within each cycle. By setting all but the first block's timestamps to the minimum allowed within one period, the attacker induces a fourfold rise in difficulty. Subsequently, they extend the timestamp of the final block in the next period to eight weeks later than the first block's timestamp. This action counters the previous difficulty increase by reducing it back down by a similar magnitude. Such calculated adjustments enable the indefinite continuation of this cycle, ensuring a consistent production rate of up to six blocks per second. This method meticulously avoids generating any block timestamps that would significantly deviate from the wall time plus a two-hour buffer, thereby maintaining full node acceptance of the manipulated blocks.

This intricate balance between exploiting blockchain difficulty adjustment mechanisms and adhering to network-imposed temporal constraints showcases the technical acumen required to sustain such an attack. It underscores the significance of blockchain security measures in mitigating the risk of exploitation while preserving the integrity of block time calculations.