Investigating the Impact of Delayed Mining upon Scaling Blockchain Applications under Malleability Attack—An e-Voting Scenario

Abstract

Blockchain is a disruptive technology and has attracted significant attention with prominent applications across finance, medical and many other systems. Electronic voting or e-voting is one of the emerging applications of blockchain leveraging benefits such as integrity, and non-repudiation of data. Whilst existing research has focused on using blockchain for e-voting applications to achieve transparent and verifiable solutions, there exists a gap in study with respect to an in-depth investigation for the challenges surrounding the trade-off for scalability versus security in the context of transaction malleability attack when mining capability is compromised for the blockchain network. In order to present our research, we have used e-voting as an example application to demonstrate our investigations regarding the mentioned gap. The paper does not focus on building a blockchain based e-voting system. The study carries out empirical analysis by establishing blockchain networks with varying mining strength under an extreme load of incoming transactions to achieve a real world scenario of large blockchain based system. The developed system has then been exposed to transaction malleability attack while scaling throughput up to thousands of transactions. The findings reveal that blockchain networks upon scaling, are more vulnerable to transaction malleability attack while operating under lower mining strength as compared to the networks having higher mining power under same conditions. These research outcomes would help researchers and application architect to build highly secured and large scaled applications. To the best of our knowledge, there has not been any published empirical investigation present in the given context.