Research output per year
Research output per year
Runchao Han, Zhimei Sui, Jiangshan Yu, Joseph Liu, Shiping Chen
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference Paper › Research › peer-review
Honest majority is the key security assumption of Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains. However, the recent 51% attacks render this assumption unrealistic in practice. In this paper, we challenge this assumption against rational miners in the PoW-based blockchains in reality. In particular, we show that the current incentive mechanism may encourage rational miners to launch 51% attacks in two cases. In the first case, we consider a miner of a stronger blockchain launches 51% attacks on a weaker blockchain, where the two blockchains share the same mining algorithm. In the second case, we consider a miner rents mining power from cloud mining services to launch 51% attacks. As 51% attacks lead to double-spending, the miner can profit from these two attacks. If such double-spending is more profitable than mining, miners are more intended to launch 51% attacks rather than mine honestly. We formally model such behaviours as a series of actions through a Markov Decision Process. Our results show that, for most mainstream PoW-based blockchains, 51% attacks are feasible and profitable, so profit-driven miners are incentivised to launch 51% attacks to gain extra profit. In addition, we leverage our model to investigate the recent 51% attack on Ethereum Classic (on 07/01/2019), which is suspected to be an incident of 51% attacks. We provide insights on the attacker strategy and expected revenue, and show that the attacker's strategy is near-optimal.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | ASIA CCS'21 - Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security |
Editors | Tsz Hon Yuen |
Place of Publication | New York NY USA |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
Pages | 817-831 |
Number of pages | 15 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450382878 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2021 |
Event | ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2021 - Online, Hong Kong Duration: 7 Jun 2021 → 11 Jun 2021 Conference number: 16th https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3433210 (Proceedings) |
Conference | ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2021 |
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Abbreviated title | AsiaCCS 2021 |
Country/Territory | Hong Kong |
Period | 7/06/21 → 11/06/21 |
Internet address |
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Research output: Book/Report › Commissioned Report › Other
Yu, J.
Australian Research Council (ARC)
28/07/21 → 28/07/24
Project: Research