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Power Adjusting and Bribery Racing: Novel Mining Attacks in the Bitcoin System

Published: 06 November 2019 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CCS '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
November 2019
2755 pages
ISBN:9781450367479
DOI:10.1145/3319535
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 06 November 2019

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Author Tags

  1. bitcoin
  2. block withholding
  3. blockchain
  4. bribery attack
  5. fork after withholding
  6. mining attacks
  7. selfish mining

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  • Research-article

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  • HK ITF
  • HK RGC GRF

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CCS '19
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CCS '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 149 of 934 submissions, 16%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

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  • (2024)Researcheson Security Issues of L-Stubborn Strategies in the Blockchain SystemModeling and Simulation10.12677/MOS.2024.13105613:01(576-587)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Proof of Finalization: A Self-Fulfilling Function of BlockchainIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2024.345135519(8052-8065)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Optimal Selfish Mining-Based Denial-of-Service AttackIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2023.332638619(835-850)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)A Detection Method Against Selfish Mining-Like Attacks Based on Ensemble Deep Learning in IoTIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2024.336768911:11(19564-19574)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
  • (2024)CORE: Transaction Commit-Controlled Release of Private Data Over Blockchains2024 IEEE 44th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS60910.2024.00038(322-332)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Multi‐Hop anonymous payment channel network based on onion routingIET Blockchain10.1049/blc2.12065Online publication date: 4-Feb-2024
  • (2023)FORTIS: Selfish Mining Mitigation by (FOR)geable (TI)me(S)tampsDistributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice10.1145/36163972:4(1-26)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2023
  • (2023)How Hard is Takeover in DPoS Blockchains? Understanding the Security of Coin-based Voting GovernanceProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3576915.3623171(150-164)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Under the Dark: A Systematical Study of Stealthy Mining Pools (Ab)use in the WildProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3576915.3616677(326-340)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023
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