SO IT GOES, Despite blockchain networks, growing constantly in popularity and having one of the most impressive security structure and protocols we would often like to think that they are impervious and immune to the facilitation of attacks against them however, they are not immune to the many different types of attacks among these different types of attacks the one on my radar or the attack that is the bone of contention is known as the Eclipse attack, the eclipse attack is a malicious compromising method that doesn’t directly break cryptographic algorithms or drain wallets, but instead works by isolating a target node from the rest of the legitimate network.

However, once the targeted node has been successfully isolated, the attacker can then now feed the node false data, manipulate its view of the blockchain, delay block propagation, or create favorable conditions for and facilitate larger attacks like double spending or selfish mining basically the danger of this eclipse attack significantly lies in the fact that, during an eclipse attack, the victim or targeted node believes it’s interacting with the real network, while it’s actually surrounded entirely by nodes controlled by the attacker, imagine the level of damage that can be done when this kind of impersonation takes place in the cryptocurrency network.

Imagine also, that for a decentralized system like the puss network, which basically relies on validator communication, block synchronization, and peer-to-peer trust, that an eclipse attack is successfully carried out in the system imagine therefore the amount and severity of the disruption that could be caused to the puss network operations, we are talking influencing the consensus decisions, of the community, undermining and stalling the flow of legitimate information if the puss network is to have a chance to protect itself from this attack, understanding how an eclipse attack could be carried out is very key and important this will help to also strengthen the network's resilience.

USING SRATEGIC NODE RESTARTS

To understand eclipse attack so as to be able to protect the puss network from the devastating consequence and aftermath of the attack we start first by examining and understanding the ways in which an eclipse attack can be carried out in a decentralized network like puss coin and one of the ways basically involves the timing of node restarts, this is the moment when the node refreshes its connections and rebuilds its list of active peers, this moment of node repairs and restart is a particularly sensitive period because the node is essentially “rebooting” its social network and this means for that moment however long it lasts, the network is going to be vulnerable.

Therefore if an attacker is prepared and has the agenda or the intention of attacking the network this will be the best time to do it, the attacker could basically flood the target node with inbound connections during this moment, there’s a good chance the node will accept the attacker’s nodes as trusted peers once the validator node or light client restarts and reconnects to a malicious set of nodes, it could be unknowingly have falling prey to the malicious plans of an attacker from that point forward, all its data flows through hostile intermediaries and if no monitoring is in place to verify the diversity and integrity of peer connections, the node may not realize it has been compromised at which point a lot of damage could be done to the network.

MANIPULATING NETWORK LATENCY AND ROUTING TO DELAY HONEST USERS

Another way, a more technical method or approach with which attackers can facilitate or carry out this eclipse attack against the puss network basically involves manipulating the underlying internet infrastructure to affect routing paths and create artificial delays between honest nodes and the target with this method of approach, the goal isn’t just to fill the peer table but to control the timing of information exchange therefore if an attacker can slow down or drop messages between a node and its genuine peers, they can make their own malicious nodes appear faster and more responsive than legitimate ones.

The PUSS Network, which likely operates with a decentralized communication system between validators, could be vulnerable if validators favor fast responding peers therefore once the attacker makes their malicious nodes appear more efficient than real ones, the validator will naturally prioritize these nodes for gossip protocols, block propagation, and transaction relays and as time goes on this skews the validator’s connection preference and gives the attacker increasing influence over its nodes, this method is more subtle, it just makes it slow enough that it starts relying on the wrong sources and once it gains this level of control, an attacker can selectively deliver outdated blocks, suppress critical transactions, or delay validator messages to disrupt consensus timing.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, eclipse attacks are a silent but dangerous threat to blockchain ecosystems, especially for validator based networks like the puss network, attacker here twist a node’s perception of reality by surrounding it with malicious peers, distorting information, and creating blind spots in communication therefore, for the puss network to remain robust and secure, it must anticipate these threats and develop countermeasures these countermeasures includes using randomized peer selection, monitoring latency irregularities, and implementing reputation-based peer scoring.