TY - GEN
T1 - On the Profitability of Selfish Mining Attack Under the Checkpoint Mechanism
AU - Zhou, Yu
AU - Gao, Shang
AU - Qiu, Weiwei
AU - Lei, Kai
AU - Xiao, Bin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 IEEE.
PY - 2023/12
Y1 - 2023/12
N2 - Though designed with security in mind, blockchains are vulnerable to various kinds of attacks, especially when the network computational power is low. Selfish mining is one of the most rudimentary and notorious attacks, which maliciously renders blocks found by honest miners orphaned by strategically withholding and revealing the found blocks. In this paper, we analyze the profitability of selfish mining under the checkpoint mechanism - a mechanism that has been adopted as a finality gadget by many blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash. We develop a rigorous analysis method and conduct quantitative evaluations in various scenarios to explore the mechanism's suppression effect on selfish mining. The results illustrate that the checkpoint mechanism can restrict the profit of selfish mining and increase the threshold of computational power that makes selfish mining profitable, suggesting that it is a practical defense mechanism against selfish mining.
AB - Though designed with security in mind, blockchains are vulnerable to various kinds of attacks, especially when the network computational power is low. Selfish mining is one of the most rudimentary and notorious attacks, which maliciously renders blocks found by honest miners orphaned by strategically withholding and revealing the found blocks. In this paper, we analyze the profitability of selfish mining under the checkpoint mechanism - a mechanism that has been adopted as a finality gadget by many blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash. We develop a rigorous analysis method and conduct quantitative evaluations in various scenarios to explore the mechanism's suppression effect on selfish mining. The results illustrate that the checkpoint mechanism can restrict the profit of selfish mining and increase the threshold of computational power that makes selfish mining profitable, suggesting that it is a practical defense mechanism against selfish mining.
KW - Blockchain
KW - Checkpoint Mechanism
KW - Selfish Mining
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85187338620&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/GLOBECOM54140.2023.10437863
DO - 10.1109/GLOBECOM54140.2023.10437863
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
AN - SCOPUS:85187338620
T3 - Proceedings - IEEE Global Communications Conference, GLOBECOM
SP - 898
EP - 903
BT - GLOBECOM 2023 - 2023 IEEE Global Communications Conference
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2023 IEEE Global Communications Conference, GLOBECOM 2023
Y2 - 4 December 2023 through 8 December 2023
ER -