A brand new document analyzing the Ripple network concluded that the network does not reach true consensus, as its protocol “can violate security and liveliness” and does not follow the patterns and algorithms established by a Byzantine agreement.
The report states that XRP’s network is vulnerable to malicious actors
According to Ignacio Amores-Sesar, Christian Cachin and Jovana Micic, researchers at the University of Bern, the Ripple consensus protocol introduces the idea of ”subjective validators”, so that each node declares “some trusted validators”.
In the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum, they both reach consent without authorization via Proof-of-Work (PoW). However, through Byzantine systems, access is authorized as the system cannot block malicious actors. The article goes in depth explaining the mechanism:
Ripple’s designers aimed to open up membership in the validator node set with respect to BFT [Byzantine-fault-tolerant] consent. The trusted validators of a node are defined by a Unique Node List (UNL), which plays an important role in formalizing the protocol.
The research explains that a consensus protocol in a blockchain network must ensure that “nothing bad ever happens” – malicious participants cannot spend a token twice -, calling it “security”, and the network should “keep processing the transactions “in parallel, known as” liveliness “.
Because there are no adequate conditions in terms of network-level validation in the XRP network of what is communicated through it, the paper explains why it is vulnerable to simple attacks by threats.
The Ripple network consensus protocol is fragile and fails to guarantee consensus as commonly understood in computing and among blockchain professionals.
However, researchers at the University of Bern made it clear that their explanations given on the document with samples of attacks on the Ripple network are “purely theoretical” because, as of press time, no live attack on XRP has yet been seen.
If Ripple had adopted one of the standard Byzantine-fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, “then the network would not be exposed to such dangers,” the researchers said.
Do you agree with the results of the document on the Ripple network? Let us know in the comments section below.
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