Long Range Attack Resistance

Long-range attacks involve deprecated validators, which no longer have valid voting power, rewriting history and forging a false state, such that observers cannot identify the authentic state.

Background

A long-range attack is a threat to undermine Proof of Stake consensus blockchains. A long-range Attack is a way for malicious actors to take over a blockchain with a false chain. An adversary can start with the first block of the blockchain, while having a significant portion of the staking token and begin to deceive nodes by creating a malicious version of the chain.

Concerns

Long-range attacks must be considered from the outset, left unaddressed the vulnerability to early exploitative actors or manipulation by the system developers threatens the security and decentralization of operations. Protections against this threat enable the scaling of total value secured without centralized means.

Solution

Similar to the mechanism established in Ethereum, checkpoints made to Ethereum by an active eoracle Validator Set are accepted by a smart contract interface. If the Validator Set is valid in congruence with the Ethereum state, the checkpoint is accepted. The checkpoint can then serve as a revert-proof point of reference for the eoracle state. As such, this provides an efficient and immutable mechanism to prevent a deprecated Validator Set from attempting to rewrite the eoracle state and committing an invalid history to Ethereum.

Conclusion

• Ethereum is a long-range attack-safe network

• Aegis assures long-range attack safety by leveraging Ethereum's execution layer

• These protections ensure that any malicious party cannot create an alternative version of the chain