Dust Attack Mitigation
We have already understood what dust attacks are, if you haven’t already read it, I suggest that you take a read that blog before you read this. Here is how you can mitigate a dust attack on your crypto wallet.
There are ways users can avoid spending the dust and one very important privacy tactic is using a different address for every transaction. When people look at their balances on a mobile wallet, they may not be aware that their wallet’s total is the sum of inputs and UTXOs. This means your 2 BCH could be characterized in incremental amounts like 1, 0.5, 0.25, and 0.25 to get the total sum.
If you don’t really care about privacy, you can forget about the dust and go on with your day. Or you can choose to never spend the dust and only spend the untainted funds going forward. This means you may have to accurately scan for the dust transaction, figure out the address the funds sit in and then choose to leave it alone. Luckily, there are some wallets that let you see addresses that have fractions of UTXOs in them and you can parse the funds this way.
Some wallets also allow you to add a description or a ‘flag’ to the fraction of Satoshis that were randomly sent, so you can identify the attack easily. Inopportunely, not all wallets let you select UTXOs in a manual fashion, so users with these kinds of wallets will need to import them to a client that does in order to mitigate against the dust attack. Further, there is no way people can stop dust attacks, as a good portion of blockchain networks are permission less.
A few Satoshis sent to your wallet may not be an ‘attack’ in the malicious sense of the word, as someone may have sent the small amount of bitcoin by accident. People who appreciate a higher form of privacy, though, will always regard these types of transactions as invasive and will take robust measures to circumvent them.
Download the XcelPay Wallet to make sure that you stay safe from these dusting attacks, if you want to make your wallet even more safe, keep your eyes open for all the dust that you are collecting in your wallet.
