Double-spend Attack Models with Time Advantange for Bitcoin

Pinzón, Carlos; Rocha, Camilo

doi:10.1016/j.entcs.2016.12.006

Cited by 89 publications

(75 citation statements)

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“…Since this requires to spend enough electricity, time, and/or machine rental, such a situation is hardly ever expected to happen. Third, the standard protocol forces any malicious worker to confront the computational power of the whole network, assumed to have mostly honest nodes, into a race that is very hard to win [15]. Algorithm 1 presents a definition of the above-mentioned standard protocol assumed to be followed for each worker in a blockchain system.…”

Section: Definitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A blockchain is a distributed hierarchical data structure of blocks that cannot be altered retroactively without alteration of all subsequent blocks, which requires consensus of the network majority. It was invented to serve as the public transaction ledger of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in 2008 [13], in which the need for a trusted third party is avoided: instead, this digital currency is based on the concept of 'proof of work' allowing users to execute payments by digitally signing their transactions using hashes through a distributed time-stamping service [15]. Because of its resistance to modifications, decentralized consensus, and proved robustness for supporting cryptocurrency transactions, this technology is seen to have great potential for new uses in other domains, including financial services [7,17], distributed data models [3], markets [16], government systems [9,14], healthcare [8,1,11], IoT [10], and video games [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Algorithmic Analysis of Blockchain Efficiency with Communication Delay

Pinzón

Rocha

Finke

2020

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

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This paper proposes a random network model for blockchains, a distributed hierarchical data structure of blocks that has found several applications in various industries. The model is parametric on two probability distribution functions governing block production and communication delay, which are key to capture the complexity of the mechanism used to synchronize the many distributed local copies of a blockchain. The proposed model is equipped with simulation algorithms for both bounded and unbounded number of distributed copies of the blockchain. They are used to study fast blockchain systems, i.e., blockchains in which the average time of block production can match the average time of message broadcasting used for blockchain synchronization. In particular, the model and the algorithms are useful to understand efficiency criteria associated with fast blockchains for identifying, e.g., when increasing the block production will have negative impact on the stability of the distributed data structure given the network's broadcast delay.

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Section: Definitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Algorithmic Analysis of Blockchain Efficiency with Communication Delay

Pinzón

Rocha

Finke

2020

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

Self Cite

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“…If a miner follows the protocols, it should append the last mined block to the longest chain. However, there can be several alternative chains that can be symptoms of a double spending attack [10,12,13]. A double spending attack is a situation where a miner wants to spend multiple times a certain amount of bitcoin.…”

Section: Blockchain Bitcoin and Feesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Studying Transaction Fees in the Bitcoin Blockchain with Probabilistic Logic Programming

2019

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In Bitcoin, if a miner is able to solve a computationally hard problem called proof of work, it will receive an amount of bitcoin as a reward which is the sum of the fees for the transactions included in a block plus an amount inversely proportional to the number of blocks discovered so far. At the moment of writing, the block reward is several orders of magnitude greater than the sum of transaction fees. Usually, miners try to collect the largest reward by including transactions associated with high fees. The main purpose of transaction fees is to prevent network spamming. However, they are also used to prioritize transactions. In order to use the minimum amount of fees, users usually have to find a compromise between fees and urgency of a transaction. In this paper, we develop a probabilistic logic model to experimentally analyze how fees affect confirmation time and miner’s revenue and to predict if an increase of average fees will generate a situation when the miner gets more reward by not following the protocol.

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“…In this paper we consider an approach for protecting against double-spending [17] even if combined with a Sybil attack, without the need for a global ledger consensus. In this paper, we did not consider other forms of attacks, such as eclipse attacks [18], routing attacks [19], attacks based on time advantage [20], incentive attacks [21] and quantum computing attacks [22]. Relevant surveys of other attack types are [23,24].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

k-Root-n: An Efficient Algorithm for Avoiding Short Term Double-Spending Alongside Distributed Ledger Technologies such as Blockchain

Schreiber

2020

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Blockchains such as the bitcoin blockchain depend on reaching a global consensus on the distributed ledger; therefore, they suffer from well-known scalability problems. This paper proposes an algorithm that avoids double-spending in the short term with just O(√n) messages instead of O(n); each node receiving money off-chain performs the due diligence of consulting k√n random nodes to check if any of them is aware of double-spending. Two nodes receiving double-spent money will in this way consult at least one common node with very high probability, because of the ‘birthday paradox’, and any common honest node consulted will detect the fraud. Since the velocity of money in the real world has coins circulating through at most a few wallets per day, the size of the due diligence communication is small in the short term. This ‘k-root-n’ algorithm is suitable for an environment with synchronous or asynchronous (but with fairly low latency) communication and with Byzantine faults. The presented k-root-n algorithm should be practical to avoid double-spending with arbitrarily high probability, while feasibly coping with the throughput of all world commerce. It is resistant to Sybil attacks even beyond 50% of nodes. In the long term, the k-root-n algorithm is less efficient. Therefore, it should preferably be used as a complement, and not a replacement, to a global distributed ledger technology.

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Double-spend Attack Models with Time Advantange for Bitcoin

Cited by 89 publications

References 1 publication

Algorithmic Analysis of Blockchain Efficiency with Communication Delay

Algorithmic Analysis of Blockchain Efficiency with Communication Delay

Studying Transaction Fees in the Bitcoin Blockchain with Probabilistic Logic Programming

k-Root-n: An Efficient Algorithm for Avoiding Short Term Double-Spending Alongside Distributed Ledger Technologies such as Blockchain

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