BDoS: Blockchain Denial of Service
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by
Michael Mirkin, Yan Ji, Jonathan Pang, Ariah Klages-Mundt, Ittay Eyal, Ari Juels
2019
Abstract
Proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin secure vast
amounts of money. Participants expend resources to participate and receive
monetary rewards for their efforts. Despite rivalry among cryptocurrencies and
financial incentive to disrupt blockchain availability, Denial of Service (DoS)
attacks against blockchains are rare. Arguably, this is due to their cost:
Known attacks either target individual participants or require the control of
the majority of the system resources.
In this work, we present an incentive-based attack on blockchain
availability, Blockchain-DoS (BDoS), with a significantly lower cost.
Despite a plethora of work on revenue-driven attacks, to the best of our
knowledge, this is the first incentive-based sabotage DoS attack.
We consider an attacker with an exogenous motivation, who is willing to spend
resources in order to stop blockchain progress. The attacker commits to a
behavior that incentivizes the other participants to stop mining, bringing the
blockchain to a halt.
We analyze the miner behavior as a game with iterated elimination of strictly
dominated strategies (IESDS). We observe that the success of the attack depends
on a variety of factors: the mining power of the attacker, the mining power of
the largest non-attacking miner, and the profitability of the mining process.
We find that under realistic conditions, based on a new analysis of public
data, an attack on Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies requires as little as 20
the mining power. The situation is even worse if miners can use their equipment
in another blockchain rather than turn it off. We propose countermeasures to
deter BDoS.
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