Solana falls victim to DDoS attack

Yesterday there were problems with transaction validation on Solana. According to a tweet by Blockasset, which was later removed, it was a DDoS attack. 

The #Solana validator network is experiencing issues this morning. TPS issues as the network works to process txn requests.
Remember, this is blockchain 😊 If your txn ID went through then it’s not lost, just pending. Growing pains is all! pic.twitter.com/2Zfagq092M

— GenesysGo (@GenesysGo) December 9, 2021

What is a DDoS attack and what happened to Solana

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are operations in which large numbers of requests are sent to specific servers, which are then congested to the point where they are no longer able to respond. 

The problem that has temporarily blocked transactions on Solana is due to excessive network congestion, which appears to have been caused by a DDoS attack. This would therefore be an external attack and not an internal problem. 

Moreover, DDoS attacks are not breaches, but merely overloads from outside that block operations. 

However, it is surprising that a blockchain can suffer from DDoS attacks. Truly decentralized blockchains do not have servers that can prevent operations if blocked. For example, the Bitcoin network has over 14,000 public nodes spread all over the world, and it is virtually impossible for anyone to attack them all. 

If the DDoS attack on Solana is confirmed, it would mean that the network has only a small number of nodes to be able to withstand such an attack. It is also not the first time that Solana has gone down. 

Blockchain vulnerabilities to DDoS attacks

Unfortunately, cryptocurrency networks with only a few nodes have often become victims of DDoS attacks lately, as have centralized exchanges. The vulnerability here lies in the fact that there are not enough nodes (or servers) to block them all. 

Some networks, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, are in fact protected from such attacks, precisely because they are based on a sufficiently high number of nodes. 

The price of Solana

Solana has only been on the markets since April last year, so it is probably still too young a project to be sufficiently distributed to withstand DDoS attacks. 

It is worth noting that in the last 24 hours, the price of the SOL token has lost 6%, so in reality not very much considering that the loss in the last 7 days has increased to 25%. However, it is worth mentioning that compared to 12 months ago, the gain is still 10,000%, even though the current price is 32% lower than the absolute maximum of 6 November.