Latest Bitcoin Core Code Release Protects Against Nation-State Attacks

Attack architecture

Erebus falls under the general “man-in-middle” attack scheme made possible through the P2P nature of bitcoin. Greek for “shadow,” Erebus is itself a derivative of the “Eclipse” attack first described in 2015.

As theorized, the malicious actor will try and connect to as many nodes as possible around one node that the attacker wishes to isolate (an exchange’s node, for example). The malicious node can begin to influence the victim node by connecting to its peers. The end goal is to make the victim node’s eight external connections pass through the malicious party.

Once accomplished, the victim is isolated from the rest of the network. The malicious actor can decide what transactions and information are sent to the victim; this information can be completely different from the rest of the network and could even lead to a chain split or censorship.