The Solana blockchain is going through a serious stress test due to having to resist a DDoS attack. In spite of this, the network has continued to operate without downtime.
Solana Attack Fails as Network Withstands Stress Test
For over a week, the SOL network has been under constant DDoS attacks, with the attack reaching a peak of 6 terabits per second. This puts the Solana attack among the four biggest attacks that have been recorded on any distributed system.
The monitoring system of the network showed that everything is functioning properly. The transactions were being confirmed almost instantaneously and the blocks were being generated on time.
Data from Pipe Network showed that the average transaction confirmation took about 450 milliseconds. Even the longest confirmations took no longer than 700 milliseconds. Slot times showed no delays beyond zero to one slots.
What this means is that validators could produce blocks even under a significant amount of traffic. In this scenario, experts had anticipated seeing a significant delay in transactions, missed slots, and a long time for confirmation. But this is not the case.
Similar attacks were seen in the past for Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. The highest observed instances ranged from over 2Tbps to over 40Tbps.
By contrast, there was a DDoS attack on the Sui network yesterday. This resulted in a delay in the generation of blocks and a slowdown in performance.
This is not the Solana attack. There was a similar move in 2022 that showed vulnerabilities in the Solana network, making it hard for the network to be stable.
Similar threats have also been faced by other blockchain networks. Last year, Cardano discovered DDoS attacks that started from block numbers around a certain figure but did not target the mainnet.
What is a DDoS Attack?
A DDoS attack has the purpose of overloading the target with too much traffic rather than stealing information. A network of computers, called a botnet, is used to flood the target computer with a large number of requests.
Despite this kind of success, there are still concerns about the effects of the Solana attack. For context, the amount of validators participating in this network has reduced. Also, from reports, active validators on the network lessened from over 2,500 to less than 1,000 in a span of a few years.
However, it is worth noting that Solana reps have in the past bragged about the network’s technology. Last month, the foundation manager of the network challenged the executives of Ripple to a debate.
Additionally, in September, the Solana community was able to vote for and implement a major update to the blockchain in an effort to make it faster and more efficient.
Source: https://coingape.com/crypto-attack-of-the-century-solana-network-resists-historic-ddos-with-zero-downtime/
