Eclipse attacks
A typical attack that can be performed against a decentralized peer-to-peer network is an eclipse attack.
Unlike the attacks described previously, which targeted blockchain mechanisms (such as the consensus mechanism and block transactions), in the case of an Eclipse attack, the attacker's target is the network itself.
An Eclipse attack isolates some victim nodes from the rest of the peer-to-peer network, preventing them from communicating with the remaining nodes. Usually, the nodes of a peer-to-peer network make use of a special communication protocol (known as a gossip protocol) to establish connections between them, and to exchange information regarding the overall status of the network. In this way, the individual nodes ...
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