Related papers: Profitable Double-Spending Attacks
Mining blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol is well-known to be resource-consuming. A miner bears the operational cost, mainly electricity consumption and IT gear, of mining, and is compensated by a…
Bitcoin is a popular digital currency for online payments, realized as a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Bitcoin keeps a ledger of all transactions; the majority of the participants decides on the correct ledger. Since…
In this paper, we address the critical challenges of double-spending and selfish mining attacks in blockchain-based digital currencies. Double-spending is a problem where the same tender is spent multiple times during a digital currency…
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…
A widespread security claim of the Bitcoin system, presented in the original Bitcoin white-paper, states that the security of the system is guaranteed as long as there is no attacker in possession of half or more of the total computational…
In this paper we revisit the mining strategies in proof of work based cryptocurrencies and propose two strategies, we call smart and smarter mining, that in many cases strictly dominate honest mining. In contrast to other known attacks,…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of…
Mining is the important part of the blockchain used the proof of work (PoW) on its consensus, looking for the matching block through testing a number of hash calculations. In order to attract more hash computing power, the miner who finds…
Open-access blockchains based on proof-of-work protocols have gained tremendous popularity for their capabilities of providing decentralized tamper-proof ledgers and platforms for data-driven autonomous organization. Nevertheless, the…
Blockchain protocols incentivize participation through monetary rewards, assuming rational actors behave honestly to maximize their gains. However, attackers may attempt to harm others even at personal cost. These denial of profit attacks…
Blockchain denial of service (BDoS) and selfish mining are the two most crucial attacks on blockchain technology. A classical DoS attack targets the computer network to limit, restrict, or stop accessing the system of authorized users which…
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto proposed an electronic cash system (bitcoin) that is completely realized by peer-to-peer technology. The core value of this scheme is that it proposes a solution based on Proof-of Work, so that the cash system can…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…
Blockchain technology is widely used in various fields due to its ability to provide decentralization and trustless security. This is a fundamental understanding held by many advocates, but it is misunderstood, leading participants to fail…
In this paper, we systematically explore the attack surface of the Blockchain technology, with an emphasis on public Blockchains. Towards this goal, we attribute attack viability in the attack surface to 1) the Blockchain cryptographic…
A principal vulnerability of a proof-of-work ("PoW") blockchain is that an attacker can re-write the history of transactions by forking a previously published block and build a new chain segment containing a different sequence of…
Bitcoin's (BTC) Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) has been a source of vulnerability for incentive attacks such as selfish mining, block withholding and coin hopping strategies. In this paper, first, we rigorously study the short-term…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
Mining processes of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are currently incentivized with voluntary transaction fees and fixed block rewards which will halve gradually to zero. In the setting where optional and arbitrary transaction fee…
Blockchain is a distributed ledger, which is protected against malicious modifications by means of cryptographic tools, e.g. digital signatures and hash functions. One of the most prominent applications of blockchains is cryptocurrencies,…