Proceedings ArticleDOI
On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains
Arthur Gervais,Ghassan Karame,Karl Wüst,Vasileios Glykantzis,Hubert Ritzdorf,Srdjan Capkun +5 more
- pp 3-16
TLDR
This paper introduces a novel quantitative framework to analyse the security and performance implications of various consensus and network parameters of PoW blockchains and devise optimal adversarial strategies for double-spending and selfish mining while taking into account real world constraints.Abstract:
Proof of Work (PoW) powered blockchains currently account for more than 90% of the total market capitalization of existing digital cryptocurrencies. Although the security provisions of Bitcoin have been thoroughly analysed, the security guarantees of variant (forked) PoW blockchains (which were instantiated with different parameters) have not received much attention in the literature. This opens the question whether existing security analysis of Bitcoin's PoW applies to other implementations which have been instantiated with different consensus and/or network parameters. In this paper, we introduce a novel quantitative framework to analyse the security and performance implications of various consensus and network parameters of PoW blockchains. Based on our framework, we devise optimal adversarial strategies for double-spending and selfish mining while taking into account real world constraints such as network propagation, different block sizes, block generation intervals, information propagation mechanism, and the impact of eclipse attacks. Our framework therefore allows us to capture existing PoW-based deployments as well as PoW blockchain variants that are instantiated with different parameters, and to objectively compare the tradeoffs between their performance and security provisions.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
A survey on the security of blockchain systems
TL;DR: Wang et al. as discussed by the authors conduct a systematic study on the security threats to blockchain and survey the corresponding real attacks by examining popular blockchain systems. And they also review the security enhancement solutions for blockchain, which could be used in the development of various blockchain systems, and suggest some future directions to stir research efforts into this area.
Book ChapterDOI
A Survey of Attacks on Ethereum Smart Contracts SoK
TL;DR: This work analyses the security vulnerabilities of Ethereum smart contracts, providing a taxonomy of common programming pitfalls which may lead to vulnerabilities, and shows a series of attacks which exploit these vulnerabilities, allowing an adversary to steal money or cause other damage.
Journal ArticleDOI
Blockchain distributed ledger technologies for biomedical and health care applications
TL;DR: This paper introduces blockchain technologies, including their benefits, pitfalls, and the latest applications, to the biomedical and health care domains and discusses the potential challenges and proposed solutions of adopting blockchain technologies in biomedical/health care domains.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
Do you Need a Blockchain
Karl Wüst,Arthur Gervais +1 more
TL;DR: This paper critically analyze whether a blockchain is indeed the appropriate technical solution for a particular application scenario, and distinguishes between permissionless and permissioned blockchains and contrast their properties to those of a centrally managed database.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Survey of Blockchain Security Issues and Challenges
Iuon-Chang Lin,Tzu-Chun Liao +1 more
TL;DR: Although the feature of blockchain technologies may bring us more reliable and convenient services, the security issues and challenges behind this innovative technique is also an important topic that the authors need to concern.
References
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TL;DR: A new replication algorithm that is able to tolerate Byzantine faults that works in asynchronous environments like the Internet and incorporates several important optimizations that improve the response time of previous algorithms by more than an order of magnitude.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors extract and analyze the core of the Bitcoin protocol and prove two fundamental properties which they call common prefix and chain quality in the static setting where the number of players remains fixed.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
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.
Book ChapterDOI
Majority Is Not Enough: Bitcoin Mining Is Vulnerable
Ittay Eyal,Emin Gün Sirer +1 more
TL;DR: The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain, and conventional wisdom asserts that the mining protocol is incentive-compatible and secure against colluding minority groups.
Book ChapterDOI
The Quest for Scalable Blockchain Fabric: Proof-of-Work vs. BFT Replication
TL;DR: In the early days of Bitcoin, the performance of its probabilistic proof-of-work (PoW) based consensus fabric, also known as blockchain, was not a major issue, and Bitcoin became a success story, despite its consensus latencies on the order of an hour and the theoretical peak throughput of only up to 7 transactions per second.