Mitigating DDoS Attacks on High Performance Blockchain

Lately there’s been rising incidence of blockchain networks being hit by potentially DDoS attacks, putting the networks at halt for hours.

So let’s talk about DDoS attack and how it’s addressed in ParallelChain.

What is a DDoS attack?

A DDoS (Distributed-Denial-of-Service) attack is a type of DoS (Denial-of-Service) attack that employs a large amount of corrupted computers or machines to make the network or service unavailable, by flooding it with an enormous number of spam requests, consequently causing the system to crash. In the context of blockchain, the more decentralised the network is, the more efforts and financial resources (which often exceed the rewards) are required to launch a DDoS attack on the network.

Wait. Are we back to the blockchain trilemma?

Traditional blockchain networks like Ethereum and Bitcoin are slow but highly decentralised, thus more resistant to DDoS attacks compared to more centralised systems like Solana which has chosen to compromise decentralisation and security for speed.

Sounds like a zero-sum game? Not necessarily.

As a Johnny-come-lately, ParallelChain is able to observe and learn from the flaws of others. First of all, let’s make it clear that no one is immune from DDoS attacks. Any service can be DDoS’d, for instance, without even thinking about blockchain, a bank’s website could be DDoS’d so its customers would not be able to reach their website to use their online services.

With ParallelChain’s patent-pending scaling solution “Proof-of-Immutability”, each entity manages its own blockchain and only uses independent organisations to seal the hash at some point in the chain, making the network much less vulnerable to DDoS attacks. While it’s true that sealing communication can be quite slow, but it doesn’t matter because the sealing operations are infrequent and not time critical. In other words, the sealing communications, as compared to the traffics of writing new blocks, is so insignificant that it is very hard to overburden ParallelChain with spam requests — this is also one of the design principles that enables ParallelChain to deliver massive throughput without compromising decentralisation or security.