NRDAX-T0198 - Peer List Sort CPU Amplification

Compute amplification · P2P and gossip · no bound · active · first seen 2026-07-07

provenance: Reproduced in NullRabbit's attack-reproduction pipeline

mechanism

Cardano PeerSharing MsgShareRequest O(N log N) sort CPU amp: sortBy+hashWithSalt over the ~3000-peer known set per request (~170 us), no idle timeout (Codec.hs:160), no per-peer rate limit. One post-handshake connection flooding MsgShareRequest pins ~10-20% of a core; multi-attacker linear. NullRabbit measurement; chains/cardano/findings/H_CARDANO_4_PEERSHARING.

live exposure

No exposure data. Slashr ↗ has no risk signal mapped to this technique yet — absence of data is not absence of exposure.

instances (2)

chain	primitive	fidelity	origin	reproducer (bundle)	source
cardano	cardano_peershare_sort_cpu	lab	NullRabbit Labs	cardano_peershare_sort_cpu	github.com ↗
conflux	conflux_hello_protocols_on2_dos	lab	reverse-engineered-cve	conflux_hello_protocols_on2_dos	github.com ↗

related (Compute amplification)

NRDAX-T0006 - Async Runtime Blocking VM Execution active NRDAX-T0076 - Expensive Debug RPC Compute Amplification active NRDAX-T0088 - GetData Request Flood active NRDAX-T0100 - Handshake Crypto CPU Burn active NRDAX-T0139 - Legacy Sighash Quadratic CPU Blowup active NRDAX-T0143 - Malformed Field Gossip Before Validation active NRDAX-T0148 - Malformed KZG Proof Mismatch DoS active NRDAX-T0166 - Move Verifier Fixpoint CPU Exhaustion active

cite

https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0198

plain

NRDAX Registry. Technique NRDAX-T0198.

bibtex

@misc{nrdax_NRDAX_T0198,
  title = {Peer List Sort CPU Amplification (NRDAX-T0198)},
  howpublished = {NRDAX Registry},
  url = {https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0198},
}

json (csl)

{
  "id": "nrdax-NRDAX-T0198",
  "type": "dataset",
  "title": "Peer List Sort CPU Amplification (NRDAX-T0198)",
  "URL": "https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0198",
  "publisher": "NRDAX Registry"
}

badge

[![NRDAX-T0198 in the NRDAX registry](https://nrdax.com/badge/NRDAX-T0198.svg)](https://nrdax.com/techniques/NRDAX-T0198-peer-list-sort-cpu-amplification)

use from the CLI

Retrieve or cite this technique from a script or the terminal with the NRDAX Python library & CLI.

Retrieve this technique

nrdax get NRDAX-T0198

Cite it (BibTeX)

nrdax cite NRDAX-T0198 --format bibtex

CLI guide → GitHub ↗