This is called a Sybil Attack. Here are some bits of existing info (even though the thread titles don’t exactly match your question they still contain very relevant info to this question):
- From oillio in How does maidsafe solve double spending:
The first line of defense is the fact that a node is expensive to run. A node must provide an amount of storage space and it must respond to requests in a timely manner. The number of coins a node may be responsible for is directly related to the resources it provides to the network. If an attacking node does not participate productively in the network, it will be pushed to the outskirts of the network, increasingly ignored by the other nodes.
‘Vault ranking’ is what you want to read about to understand this better.
- From fergish in How is Farming centralization Disincentivized?:
I doubt they’ll divert resources from their current profit models. For them it would be relatively expensive compared to what they get out of it.
Research the incentive structure of the safe network to understand this (the attacker benefits more by being a ‘good’ actor than a malicious actor). Yes the attack you talk about can be done, but what’s the motivation?
- There’s also info on the wiki
https://safenetwork.wiki/en/FAQ#Birthday_paradox.2FSybil_Attacks
the attacker would require the ability to surround specific Vaults in the SAFE Network. This cannot be achieved, as it would require being able to effectively generate different values which, when hashed with SHA-512, result in close hashes around one particular point.
The difficulty of doing this comes down to being able to control group consensus for a particular piece of data. It’s prohibitively difficult to a) know what data you want to control and b) actually be the 28 of 32 nodes that form that group for consensus. This is due to the way vault naming and xor distance works when forming close groups.
Yes this is a lot of jargon but it gives you somewhere to start researching and hopefully answers your original questions 