Vitalik ETHCC speech highlights: advocating enhanced automated defense against 51% attacks

Original title: Vitalik Buterin discusses hypothetical Ethereum 51% attacks

Original author: Tim Copeland, The Block

Original translation: DeThings

Key points summary:

· Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is pushing the Ethereum network to be better prepared in the face of a 51% attack.

· He advocates that automatic responses to such attacks should be prepared to reduce social pressure.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is pushing the Ethereum network to be reviewed and prepared for hypothetical 51% attacks

“This is something I’m advocating that we do more research and build on,” he said during a keynote at the ETHCC in Brussels.

Buterin is considering the concept of a 51% attack, where a malicious actor (or multiple actors working in coordination) produces more of the state of Ethereum blocks than the honest actors. He believes that one of the biggest concerns is that this could lead to censorship on the network.

In a potential response to such an attack, he said that honest validators should move to a fork of the chain. The current plan relies heavily on social consensus, with community members working together to reach an agreement on a fork.

However, Buterin believes that it would be better if the network was more prepared for such a response. It would be best if such a response was largely automated and planned in advance, he said.

"We want the response to a 51% attack to be as automated as possible. So if you are a validator, then your node should be running software that will automatically counter-censor the majority chain if it detects that a transaction is censored, or that certain validators are censored or it is being censored, and all the honest nodes will automatically, as a result of the code that they are running, coordinate to use the same minority software," he said.

Buterin acknowledged that it would be impossible to automatically move 100% of the network to a fork because there are many limitations. But he said: "The closer you can get to that, the less effort social consensus needs to take."

He said the technical layer needs to at least provide a clear winning soft fork candidate so that the community can come together if they need to get rid of the censored chain.

Buterin’s other suggestions for Ethereum

Buterin also advocated for increased adoption of light clients at the infrastructure level of Ethereum, especially including wallets. He said they should also support verification of zk-EVM, further supporting second-layer networks.

He also discussed the issue of quantum resistance. He noted that this is an open question for the Ethereum blockchain. However, he believes that the network faces four risk elements - Merkle trees, consensus signatures, data blocks, and user accounts - but each has its own solution.

In addition to this, he pushed for further protocol simplification to make it easier for developers and users to use.

Original link

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