Re: [ANN][XRB]Cryptocurrency's killer app: RaiBlocks micropayments
5. The Man in the Middle attack.
If an attacker succeeds to put himself between a merchant and the RaiBlocks network he can just filter the double spending payment packets, and the merchant will never know that he is receiving a double spending. The Raiblocks network will discard that payment while the merchant will accept it.
If an attacker succeeds to put himself between a merchant and the RaiBlocks network he can just filter the double spending payment packets, and the merchant will never know that he is receiving a double spending. The Raiblocks network will discard that payment while the merchant will accept it.
Couldn't the same MitM attack be used in a bitcoin transaction? Connect to all the peers of a merchant and mine 6 blocks containing the double spend while filtering out all longer blocks so the merchant accepts the transaction as valid.
No, because if you MITM a bitcoin merchant, you still have to mine 6 blocks with the difficulty bit set by the real network. And the difficulty only decrease by 1/4 every 2015 blocks. It will be impossible for an attacker to have such power.
Sounds like you found a fatal flaw, you should submit it and collect the bounty. Oh yeah, I forgot, you are just talking out your ass. Nevermind.