An investigation into a denial of service attack on an ethereum network

Apart from its much-publicised use in crypto-currency, blockchain technology is used in a wide range of application areas, from diamonds to wine. The most common application of this technology is in smart contracts in supply chain management, where assurance of delivery and provenance are important. One problem for an Ethereum consortium is the potential for disruption caused by a Denial-of-Service attack across the consortium nodes. Such an attack can be launched from a single source or multiple sources to amplify the effect. This paper investigates the impact of various Denial-of-Service attacks on an Ethereum Consortium deployed on the Azure Cloud platform. Our experiments demonstrated that a Denial-of-Service attack on some nodes can be successful. We found that an Ethereum Transaction Server is vulnerable to both Flood and Bandwidth Depletion attacks, but that Ethereum Mining Server nodes appear to be resilient to a Bandwidth Depletion attack.