Study: "The Ripple consensus protocol is unreliable"

The Cryptology and Data Security Research Group of the University of Bern Concludes, that the consensus algorithm in the Ripple protocol “provides neither security, no vitality ".

Christian Kachin (Christian Cachin), Ignacio Amores-Cesar (Ignacio Amores-Sesar) and Jovana Micic (Jovana Micic) published a report, which assert, that the Ripple consensus algorithm allows users to carry out double expenses. Besides, the vulnerability allows you to stop processing transactions.

Researchers launched several configurations of the Ripple protocol with a different number and type of nodes for, to demonstrate implementation flaws. According to their findings, in the presence of faulty or malicious nodes, the implications for network performance "will be devastating".

"We discovered, that the Ripple protocol is mainly relied on the synchronization of the watch, timely delivery of messages, availability of a working network and a list of trusted nodes, signed by Ripple. If one or more of these conditions are violated, especially if the attackers work from the inside, then the system may experience a serious failure ", - the researchers emphasized.

Ripple CTO David Schwartz (David Schwartz) stated, that the analysis is interesting, but "impractical". He stressed, that hackers have a chance to affect the performance of the network, but after that, how malicious activities will be detected, Ripple will permanently exclude such a node from the trusted list.

Recall, that a year ago, American economic columnist and Bitcoin fan Jeffrey Tucker (Jeffry Tucker) called XRP "extremely important technology".