TY - GEN
T1 - Power adjusting and bribery racing: Novel mining attacks in the Bitcoin system
AU - Gao, Shang
AU - Peng, Zhe
AU - Li, Zecheng
AU - Xiao, Bin
PY - 2019/11/6
Y1 - 2019/11/6
N2 - Mining attacks allow attackers to gain an unfair share of the mining reward by deviating from the honest mining strategy in the Bitcoin system. Among the most well-known are block withholding (BWH), fork after withholding (FAW), and selfish mining. In this paper, we propose two new strategies: power adjusting and bribery racing, and introduce two novel mining attacks, Power Adjusting Withholding (PAW) and Bribery Selfish Mining (BSM) adopting the new strategies. Both attacks can increase the reward of attackers. Furthermore, we show PAW can avoid the “miner's dilemma” in BWH attacks. BSM introduces a new “venal miner's dilemma”, which results in all targets (bribes) willing to help the attacker but getting less reward finally. Quantitative analyses and simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of our attacks. We propose some countermeasures to mitigate the new attacks, but a practical and efficient solution remains to be an open problem.
AB - Mining attacks allow attackers to gain an unfair share of the mining reward by deviating from the honest mining strategy in the Bitcoin system. Among the most well-known are block withholding (BWH), fork after withholding (FAW), and selfish mining. In this paper, we propose two new strategies: power adjusting and bribery racing, and introduce two novel mining attacks, Power Adjusting Withholding (PAW) and Bribery Selfish Mining (BSM) adopting the new strategies. Both attacks can increase the reward of attackers. Furthermore, we show PAW can avoid the “miner's dilemma” in BWH attacks. BSM introduces a new “venal miner's dilemma”, which results in all targets (bribes) willing to help the attacker but getting less reward finally. Quantitative analyses and simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of our attacks. We propose some countermeasures to mitigate the new attacks, but a practical and efficient solution remains to be an open problem.
KW - Bitcoin
KW - Block withholding
KW - Blockchain
KW - Bribery attack
KW - Fork after withholding
KW - Mining attacks
KW - Selfish mining
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85075938871&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3319535.3354203
DO - 10.1145/3319535.3354203
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
AN - SCOPUS:85075938871
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
SP - 833
EP - 850
BT - CCS 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 26th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2019
Y2 - 11 November 2019 through 15 November 2019
ER -