Securing blockchain the right way: Delayed Proof of Work (DPoW)
In the first half of 2018, crypto mining attacks on different blockchains have increased 956% compared to 2017. If a coin or token is not secure, it’s simply a matter of time before it gets hacked. There have been a number of successful attacks in the past that proves this, on September 13–14 2018, Ravencoin suffered a double spend attack by morally bankrupt attackers.
One of the known vulnerabilities of crypto-currencies is the 51% double-spend attack.
Any mining pool, or individual that can generate more mining power than the rest of the network, can tamper with the network. They can’t spend your funds, as that would require your private key, but they can spend their own funds twice, so securing the core assets of a project is much more important than ever.
To give an example how this problem might effect a cryptocurrency and possibly an exchange, a little known cryptocurrency called AurumCoin (AU) has claimed that it was hit by 51% attack and the exchange which AU is listed, Cryptopia, lost 15,752.26 AU (~$550.000 at the time). The hackers sent the coins to the exchange and sold it for another currency and then using the superior hash power, they were able to reverse this transaction by altering the status of the new blocks and the whole blockchain.
Having understood the importance of this issue, let’s take a look at what SUQA is preparing to fight with this threat:
SUQA Foundation has partnered up with Komodo Platform to utilize a unique security mechanism to protect its own blockchain. Essentially the hashpower of the Bitcoin network is used to protect the SUQA blockchain. This is made possible by storing backups of the SUQA blockchain into the Bitcoin ledger.
Every ten minutes (Bitcoin average block time) a snapshot is taken of the entire SUQA blockchain. Then this snapshot is written into a block on the Bitcoin blockchain. This process is called notarization and it is the backbone of Komodo’s security mechanism. Komodo Platform’s notary nodes carry out the technical work required to successfully complete notarizations.
The notarization process is crucial because it gives SUQA the ability to restore the SUQA blockchain from any of the previous points in time at which a backup was created. In the case of an attack, the chain would simply revert to the most recently validated backup saved onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Therefore if an attacker wants to disrupt and tries to make any changes on SUQA blockchain, the attacker needs to effectively overhash (>51%) the Bitcoin network in order to destroy the SUQA backups before they do any disruption to the SUQA blockchain.
