Rollback attack is one of the many different types of digital and cryptographic attacks that basically poses a significant security threat and risk to cryptographic protocols and systems as well as to blockchain networks most especially those networks and systems that depend and rely on secure communication and data integrity.
In facilitating or executing a rollback attack it requires and involves the attacker finding whatever means, weakness in the blockchain network to intercept and modify the communication between two parties for the purpose of causing one of the parties to revert the system to an older and less secure or its previous state.
In this post of mine I going to be explaining and discussing some of the different effective strategies to avoid and prevent cryptogaphic networks from falling victim or suffering from the risk and effects of the rollback attack, by basically focusing resources on maintaining secure and robust communications.
- IMPLEMENTING FORWARD SECRECY
Forward secrecy can basically be defined as a very crucial and important cryptographic property or feature that basically ensures that when a cryptographic key is compromised it does not affect or determine the integrity of the present or new cryptographic key that way it helps to protect the cryptographic network against rollback attacks.
Additionally, in cryptographic networks and protocols that employ and implement forward secrecy, each session key is derived and generated independently which allows it to not act as a static or long term key therefore each key is only valid for a session and cannot be used to determine or compromise the network once it is invalid therefore making it impossible for attackers to have the opportunity to revert the state of the network.
- EMPLOY CRYPTOGRAPHIC HASHING AND INTEGRITY CHECKS
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Cryptographic hashing and regular integrity checks can be a very important technique in preventing rollback attacks in blockchain and cryptographic networks seeing as regularly checking the network ensures that data or protocols have not been tampered with or altered.
Then when it comes to applying and implementing the cryptographic hashing, when it is implemented it is able to generate a specific fixed size amount or set of characters that is numbers, letters and underscores that is unique to the inputed data, this simply means that any changes to the inputed data will result in the change of the hash which allows tampering to be easily detected.
Therefore to avoid rollback attacks, cryptographic systems should use cryptographic hashes to verify the integrity of protocols and communications before they are used and implemented that way the chances of anyone unkowningly obeying false commands to revert to an old version or state of the cryptographic network will be reduced.
- ENSURING REGULAR VERSION UPDATES
Regularly ensuring that the network is updated from its old version or state to a new version and state is another effective way to prevent rollback attack, and this can be done by employing very strict mechanisms and protocols that are programmed to completely enforce the updates and enhancement in the protocols and algorithms of the blockchain network.
Additionally these enforcement protocols are necessary because this whole attack started or is built on the fact that attackers found a way to revert the updates of blockchain networks and cryptographic systems that is why extra steps has to be taken to enforce and make sure that updates are versions upgrades are carried out and implemented as planned.
Furthermore, new systems should be designed to ensure that the blockchain or cryptographic networks reject or is not able to run and function properly on older protocol versions once a new version or update is available, this will also help to prevent rollback attack.
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In conclusion, I would like to say a very big thank to everyone of you who made the effort to read and go through this post which I have made, and I hope that you have been able to learn something new as I have explained and discussed the significant methods, techniques and ways to prevent rollback attack in cryptographic network and blockchain networks.