Forked Ethereum (ETH) network in trouble, suffering from DDoS attack

In the past two days, the Ethereum (ETH) network, which was urgently hard forked due to The Dao incident, has been in constant trouble. First, a high-risk vulnerability in the Geth client was exposed, causing the node running the client to crash. Then, due to a problem with EXTCODESIZE opcode, the ETH network suffered a DDoS attack.

According to Ethereum developer and co-founder Jeffrey Wilcke:

The Ethereum (ETH) network is currently under attack, which is classified as a DDoS attack. That is, miners and nodes take a long time (20-60 seconds) to process some blocks. The cause of this attack is an EXTCODESIZE opcode, which has a fairly low gas price and requires nodes to read state information from disk. The attack transaction calls this opcode about 50,000 times per block. As a result, the network has slowed down significantly, but no consensus failures or memory overloads have occurred. Currently, we have identified several sustainable medium-term fixes that developers are already implementing.

It is recommended that you switch to the Parity client for mining and use the following configuration:

–cache-size-db 1024 –gas-floor-target 1000000 –gasprice 50000000000

Parity Mining Guide:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j3v8bKjXQcMNNdx5Juwo3PRRCcHy8XcA6R9-0W7NCso/edit

https://github.com/ethcore/parity/wiki/Mining

If you continue to use the geth client, you can use the following settings:

–cache 1024 –targetgaslimit 1000000 –gasprice 50000000000

Slightly different from the solution given by Jeffrey Wilcke, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin gave the following configuration method for the geth client in his blog:

–cache 1024 –targetgaslimit 1500000 –gasprice 20000000000

The settings for the Parity client are:

–cache-size-db 1024 –gas-floor-target 1500000 –gasprice 20000000000 –gas-cap 1500000

According to Vitalik, the eth developer team is actively fixing the Go client to provide a more stable solution and mitigate the threat of similar attacks.