Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
6-2024
Abstract
We study selfish mining attacks in longest-chain blockchains like Bitcoin, but where the proof of work is replaced with efficient proof systems - like proofs of stake or proofs of space - and consider the problem of computing an optimal selfish mining attack which maximizes expected relative revenue of the adversary, thus minimizing the chain quality. To this end, we propose a novel selfish mining attack that aims to maximize this objective and formally model the attack as a Markov decision process (MDP). We then present a formal analysis procedure which computes an ϵ-tight lower bound on the optimal expected relative revenue in the MDP and a strategy that achieves this ϵ-tight lower bound, where ϵ > 0 may be any specified precision. Our analysis is fully automated and provides formal guarantees on the correctness. We evaluate our selfish mining attack and observe that it achieves superior expected relative revenue compared to two considered baselines.In concurrent work [Sarenche FC'24] does an automated analysis on selfish mining in predictable longest-chain blockchains based on efficient proof systems. Predictable means the randomness for the challenges is fixed for many blocks (as used e.g., in Ouroboros), while we consider unpredictable (Bitcoin-like) chains where the challenge is derived from the previous block.
Keywords
Blockchain, Formal Methods, Efficient Proof Systems, Selfish Mining, Markov Decision Process
Discipline
Databases and Information Systems
Research Areas
Intelligent Systems and Optimization
Areas of Excellence
Digital transformation
Publication
PODC '24: Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, Nantes, France, June 17-21
First Page
268
Last Page
278
ISBN
9798400706684
Identifier
10.1145/3662158.3662769
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Citation
CHATTERJEE, Krishnendu; EBRAHIMZADEH, Amirali; KARRABI, Mehrdad; PIETRZAK, Krzysztof; YEO, Michelle; and ZIKELIC, Dorde.
Fully automated selfish mining analysis in efficient proof systems blockchains. (2024). PODC '24: Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, Nantes, France, June 17-21. 268-278.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/9064
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/3662158.3662769