Open AccessPosted Content
On Subversive Miner Strategies and Block Withholding Attack in Bitcoin Digital Currency
Nicolas T. Courtois,Lear Bahack +1 more
TLDR
This paper revisits the concept of block withholding attacks and proposes a new concrete and practical block withholding attack which is shown to maximize the advantage gained by rogue miners.Abstract:
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 creating (minting) the new coins which are later put into circulation. Miners spend electricity on solving cryptographic puzzles and they are also gatekeepers which validate bitcoin transactions of other people. Miners are expected to be honest and have some incentives to behave well. However. In this paper we look at the miner strategies with particular attention paid to subversive and dishonest strategies or those which could put bitcoin and its reputation in danger. We study in details several recent attacks in which dishonest miners obtain a higher reward than their relative contribution to the network. In particular we revisit the concept of block withholding attacks and propose a new concrete and practical block withholding attack which we show to maximize the advantage gained by rogue miners.
RECENT EVENTS: it seems that the attack was recently executed, see Section XI-A.read more
Citations
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A Survey on Security and Privacy Issues of Bitcoin
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Stubborn Mining: Generalizing Selfish Mining and Combining with an Eclipse Attack
TL;DR: This paper expands the mining strategy space to include novel "stubborn" strategies that, for a large range of parameters, earn the miner more revenue, and shows how a miner can further amplify its gain by non-trivially composing mining attacks with network-level eclipse attacks.
References
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Information propagation in the Bitcoin network
TL;DR: This paper analyzes how Bitcoin uses a multi-hop broadcast to propagate transactions and blocks through the network to update the ledger replicas, and verifies the conjecture that the propagation delay in the network is the primary cause for blockchain forks.
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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable
Ittay Eyal,Emin Gün Sirer +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that the Bitcoin protocol is not incentive-compatible and present an attack with which colluding miners obtain a revenue larger than their fair share, which can have significant consequences for Bitcoin: Rational miners will prefer to join the selfish miners, and the colluding group will increase in size until it becomes a majority.
Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure
TL;DR: This paper captures in one place the various applications, improvements suggested and related subsequent publications, and describes initial experience from experiments using hashcash.
Book ChapterDOI
Bitter to Better — How to Make Bitcoin a Better Currency
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors perform an in-depth investigation to understand what made Bitcoin so successful, while decades of research on cryptographic e-cash has not lead to a large-scale deployment.
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Analysis of Bitcoin Pooled Mining Reward Systems
TL;DR: The various scoring systems used to calculate rewards of participants in Bitcoin pooled mining are described, explain the problems each were designed to solve and analyze their respective advantages and disadvantages.