Short Paper: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Stake! Resource Exhaustion Attacks on PoS

We present a new resource exhaustion attack affecting several chain-based proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies, and in particular Qtum, a top 30 cryptocurrency by market capitalization ($300M as of Sep ’18). In brief, these cryptocurrencies do not adequately validate the proof-of-stake before allocating resources to data received from peers. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability, even without any stake at all, simply by connecting to a victim and sending malformed blocks, which the victim stores on disk or in RAM, eventually leading to a crash. We demonstrate and benchmark the attack through experiments attacking our own node on the Qtum main network; in our experiment we are able to fill the victim’s RAM at a rate of 2MB per second, or the disk at a rate of 6MB per second. We have begun a responsible disclosure of this vulnerability to appropriate development teams. Our disclosure includes a Docker-based reproducibility kit using the Python-based test framework. This problem has gone unnoticed for several years. Although the attack can be mitigated, this appears to require giving up optimizations enjoyed by proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, underscoring the difficulty in implementing and deploying chain-based proof-of-stake.