Suhyeon Lee

2022

1. 

   Block Double-Submission Attack: Block Withholding Can Be Self-Destructive

   Suhyeon Lee, Donghwan Lee, and Seungjoo Kim

   In AFT 2022 - ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies, 2022

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   Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a Sybil control mechanism adopted in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. It prevents the attempt of malicious actors to manipulate distributed ledgers. Bitcoin has successfully suppressed double-spending by accepting the longest PoW chain. Nevertheless, PoW encountered several major security issues surrounding mining competition. One of them is a Block WithHolding (BWH) attack that can exploit a widespread and cooperative environment called a mining pool. This attack takes advantage of untrustworthy relationships between mining pools and participating agents. Moreover, detecting or responding to attacks is challenging due to the nature of mining pools. In this paper, however, we suggest that BWH attacks also have a comparable trust problem. Because a BWH attacker cannot have complete control over BWH agents, they can betray the belonging mining pool and seek further benefits by trading with victims. We prove that this betrayal is not only valid in all attack parameters but also provides double benefits; finally, it is the best strategy for BWH agents. Furthermore, our study implies that BWH attacks may encounter self-destruction of their own revenue, contrary to their intention.

   @inproceedings{lee2022block,
     author = {Lee, Suhyeon and Lee, Donghwan and Kim, Seungjoo},
     title = {Block Double-Submission Attack: Block Withholding Can Be Self-Destructive},
     year = {2022},
     isbn = {9781450398619},
     publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
     address = {New York, NY, USA},
     doi = {10.1145/3558535.3559787},
     booktitle = {AFT 2022 - ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies},
     pages = {232–243},
     numpages = {12},
     keywords = {blockchain, proof-of-work, block double-submission attack, block withholding attack, game theoretic analysis},
     location = {Cambridge, MA, USA},
     series = {AFT '22},
   }