Ethereum (fork) will undergo two hard forks to solve the DoS attack problem, and ETC will also undergo a hard fork

It now appears that Ethereum (fork) has planned to carry out two hard forks in order to solve the problem of Dos attacks.

However, unlike the earlier hard fork that was carried out to thwart The DAO attacker, this one is done to ensure network security.

Since the end of September, the Ethereum (forked) network has been hit by a large number of DoS attacks. Although these attacks did not cause any consensus problems, they significantly slowed down the network, forcing the Ethereum Foundation to perform a hard fork.

What exactly caused the security breach?

One of the problems is that it is easy and cheap (with very low 'gas' prices) for an attacker to create fake smart contracts and use these to repeatedly spam the network.

Gas is Ethereum’s internal pricing for running transactions or smart contracts.

Inside the Ethereum network, the attacker has a server that can repeatedly calculate the same process, which slows down legitimate mining operations. In this case, the attack transaction calls an opcode called 'EXTCODESIZE' about 50,000 times per block.

The Ethereum (fork) development team has tried to implement a series of patches to solve this problem, but more drastic action is still needed. This hard fork is designed to significantly increase the cost of attack for attackers.

In a post on the Ethereum (fork) blog, Ethereum security lead Martin Swende wrote:

“While recent patches have successfully improved overall client resiliency, these attacks demonstrate the need for low-level changes to the EVM pricing model.”

EVM is the abbreviation of Ethereum virtual machine, and smart contracts run on EVM.

According to Swende, the first hard fork will increase gas prices to "better correspond to the underlying computational complexity." The second hard fork will then aim to reduce "state bloat" by removing empty accounts introduced by the attacker.

The first hard fork will take place on October 18, and the second will take place on October 25.

Ethereum (original chain) will also be hard forked

Of course, since Ethereum (original chain) and Ethereum (fork) are originally the same chain, it is not surprising that Ethereum (original chain) is also suffering from similar attacks. In response, the Ethereum (original chain) network will undergo a single fork on October 25, which will take effect from block 2,500,000.

Because the key to Ethereum (the original chain) is to establish the principle of immutability on the blockchain, ETC has explained the fork to be carried out.

Ethereum Classic: Hard forks that change the blockchain ledger are bad, while hard forks that provide technical improvements are good.

Obviously, it is still up for debate whether all forks are the same. The ETC community said that those forks that are done to consolidate the network are fine, while those that are done to roll back transactions, such as The DAO incident, are not.

Carlo Vicari, ETC community manager, wrote on Reddit:

“ This hard fork to improve the protocol is very consistent with our principle of immutability. ”

Why would someone attack Ethereum?

The reason is that the attackers may want to make money by shorting the market. Because when these attacks occur, the price of ETH falls. Vicaro told BTCManager:

“I think the reason we weren’t attacked initially was because the attacker wanted to profit by shorting the market. When the attack was launched, the price of ETH would fall, and the attacker would make money.”

Carlo has a positive attitude towards these attacks. He said that when a chain is attacked and then the attack is repelled, the chain will be stronger in the long run.

“I think it’s better for this attack to happen now and be repelled than to happen later, because years from now, we’ll have many different decentralized apps running, doing many different things, and if this attack happens then, that would be a real disaster.”