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Chinese SlowMist computer security company revealed On Thursday, he tracked down three cryptographic addresses associated with the so-called "51% attack" that rocked the Ethereum Classic network on Saturday, issuing $ 270,000 in funds through double-overhead payments.
What a quick justice! Well, not really. The fact is that while SlowMist is getting closer and closer to the identification of the real people behind the caper (and is looking for your help here, friend), it is less certain that everything can be done by the way. "We think we can identify them, but it is very difficult to prosecute the attackers," an entity that only has the name "Team SlowMist" said on Thursday in an interview with Decrypt.
Yet Gabriel Shapiro, a lawyer with DLxLaw LLP and frequent cryptic commentator, he has a different approach. If you know your wrongdoing and statutory law well, and who does not ?, it could be a way to prosecute attackers in a real court. If you discover their true identity, it is so.
Legal routes
To understand it better, it's worth explaining how a 51 percent attack works. Unlike a direct change, where personal accounts are compromised, a 51% attack targets the blockchain itself, an entity that exists in the code and has no legal responsibility. In a double-expense attack, funds are not stolen, but simply written off history and replaced by new ones: a trader could expect a payment that never materializes. This is the power conferred, by consensus, to those who have more power on the network: 51% or more.
This means that common withdrawals in the "contract law" will keep a little water, says Shapiro, since all participants accept the terms of the network and the possibility of a 51% attack, simply by taking part in it. "Because of the decentralized and peer-to-peer nature of a public blockchain, there are generally no "clearly applicable" terms of use that prohibit a double-expense attack as a matter of agreement, "he says. like EOS, they tried to impose contractual obligations on their members, Shapiro doubts they are legally binding, so this leaves us with two options.
In the first place, says Shapiro, a victim could invoke the so-called "conversion" charges to look for damages. It is said that conversion occurs when a person intentionally expropriates (Shapiro's word, not ours) another "personal mobile property" or "intellectual property", which according to Shapiro would probably cover cryptocurrency. The "expropriated" domain, in this case, are the funds that have been removed from history. Otherwise, a plaintiff could pursue a case of basic fraud. "A "double expense" consists in knowingly deceiving the victim into believing that he has received funds that will not be preserved in the end ", explains Shapiro.
Under the US statute law there are more options, he adds. US laws that apply to "hacking and other forms of attacks on networks or computer systems", he explains, can provide a legal appeal to potential attack victims of 51%. The problem? There are no precedents, and the actor should hope that the existing laws, regulating general computer hacking, will be applied broadly enough to cover cryptography. This is "quite possible", says Shapiro. Through something like "Computer Fraud & Abuse act"The forces of the order could potentially seize the resources of anyone involved in a double expense.
So, will anyone really do something?
Hurray? Constant. SlowMist does not intend to prosecute the victims (and it is doubtful that it can track them anyway), insisting that "the code is law", it is played at your own risk. In fact, it is this philosophy that made Ethereum Classic end up in this mess. In 2016 hack on Decentralized autonomous exchange, which canceled about 70 million dollars of ether, the "code hard" remained clinging to the compromised network while the ethereal core explants, led by Vitalik Buterin, drove a hard fork that would repay the stolen funds.
These inflexible traditionalists, if they are true to their word, can hardly chase the engineers of the recent 51 percent attack. "That's why the ETC community will not restore its transactions and will continue to be unchanged," says Biser Dimitrov, Who managed an exchange and is familiar with the law around the subject. "& # 39; Code is law & # 39; and they played according to the rules." SlowMist agrees. "It is the rule of the blockchain world, not the rule of the human world".
