Related papers: Discouraging Pool Block Withholding Attacks in Bit…
In this paper we describe the various scoring systems used to calculate rewards of participants in Bitcoin pooled mining, explain the problems each were designed to solve and analyze their respective advantages and disadvantages.
Blockchain is a technology that provides a distributed ledger that stores previous records while maintaining consistency and security. Bitcoin is the first and largest decentralized electronic cryptographic system that uses blockchain…
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…
We study the computation contests where players compete for searching a solution to a given problem with a winner-take-all reward. The search processes are independent across the players and the search speeds of players are proportional to…
We describe and analyze perishing mining, a novel block-withholding mining strategy that lures profit-driven miners away from doing useful work on the public chain by releasing block headers from a privately maintained chain. We then…
We consider a security game in a setting consisting of two players (an attacker and a defender), each with a given budget to allocate towards attack and defense, respectively, of a set of nodes. Each node has a certain value to the attacker…
To participate in the distributed consensus of permissionless blockchains, prospective nodes -- or miners -- provide proof of designated, costly resources. However, in contrast to the intended decentralization, current data on blockchain…
The aim of this work is to enhance blockchain security by deepening the understanding of selfish mining attacks in various consensus protocols, especially the ones that have the potential to mitigate selfish mining. Previous research was…
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, are increasingly adopting layer-2 scaling solutions to improve transaction throughput and reduce fees. One popular layer-2 approach is the Optimistic Rollup, which relies on a mechanism known as a…
The value of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies critically depends on miners having incentives to follow the protocol. However, the Bitcoin mining protocol proposed by Nakamoto (2008) and implemented in practice is well known not to constitute…
Blockchains rely on economic incentives to ensure secure and decentralised operation, making incentive compatibility a core design concern. However, protocols are rarely deployed in isolation. Applications interact with the underlying…
In this paper, we provide a new theoretical framework of pyramid Markov processes to solve some open and fundamental problems of blockchain selfish mining under a rigorous mathematical setting. We first describe a more general model of…
Announcement games, where information is disseminated by announcers and challenged by validators, are prevalent in real-world scenarios. Validators take effort to verify the validity of the announcements, gaining rewards for successfully…
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,…
Privacy was one of the key points mentioned in Nakamoto's Bitcoin whitepaper, and one of the selling points of Bitcoin in its early stages. In hindsight, however, de-anonymising Bitcoin users turned out to be more feasible than expected.…
Smart contract-enabled blockchains allow building decentralized applications in which mutually-distrusted parties can work together. Recently, oracle services emerged to provide these applications with real-world data feeds. Unfortunately,…
Despite the popularity of Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) because of their use in wide areas of applications such as payment channels, atomic swaps, etc, their use in exchange is still questionable. This is because of its incentive…
Given the large adoption and economical impact of permissionless blockchains, the complexity of the underlying systems and the adversarial environment in which they operate, it is fundamental to properly study and understand the emergent…
This position paper presents a synthesis viewpoint of blockchains from two orthogonal perspectives: fault-tolerant distributed systems and game theory. Specifically, we formulate a new game-theoretical problem in the context of blockchains…
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…