What is a Sybil Attack?
A Sybil Attack is is a classic computer science problem named after a woman with the pseudonym Sybil who was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder. The attack is used on peer networks wherein a single attacker can actually take over the network by pretending to be a lot of other nodes.
An analogy would be like attackers performing a DDoS on your company website. Imagine you show up to work one day, hop on the computer to try to log into your company's web portal and you get a 404 error: "Page cannot be found". The website never loads. Your IT staff lets you know the website is down because attackers are sending a lot of fake requests to the web server. The web server doesn’t know what traffic is real and what traffic is fake. The attack is successful when the web server is overwhelmed and the website becomes unavailable to real users like you, your coworkers, and customers.
How Does Nano Protect Against it?
According to the Nano whitepaper:
An entity could create hundreds of Nano nodes on a single machine; however, since the voting system is weighted based on account balance, adding extra nodes in to the network will not gain an attacker extra votes. Therefore there is no advantage to be gained via a Sybil attack.
Nano isn't a website so instead of DDoS attacking to bring down the network, the goal of Sybil attacking Nano would be to trick the system into voting en masse for a fake transaction. Think of it in terms of voter fraud. Nano calculates the voting weight based on the account balance. The “critical mass” of nodes is so much more important than verifying blocks solely by the number of nodes. When a quorum of weighted voting has verified a block, every other node is programmed to bandwagon and vote for it as well to achieve consensus. Therefore, any extra nodes created in an attempt to trick the network won’t have enough vote weight to sway the quorum.
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