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On the detection of selfish mining and stalker attacks in blockchain networks

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Abstract

The blockchain technology emerged in 2008 as a distributed peer to peer network structure, capable of ensuring security for transactions made using the Bitcoin digital currency, without the need for third party intermediaries to validate them. Although its beginning was linked to cryptocurrencies, its use has diversified over the recent years. There are various projects using the blockchain technology to perform document validation, electronic voting, tokenization of non-perishable goods, and many others. With its increasing use, concern arises with possible attacks that could threaten the integrity of the consensus of the chain. One of the well-known attacks to the blockchain consensus mechanism is the selfish mining attack, in which malicious nodes can deflect their behavior from the standard pattern by not immediately disclosing their newly mined blocks. This malicious behavior can result in a disproportionate share of rewards for those nodes, especially if they have a significant processing power. The goal of this paper is to present a simple heuristic to detect the presence of selfish mining attack (and variants) in blockchain networks that use the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm. The proposal is to signal when the blockchain fork height deviates from the standard, indicating when the network is under the influence of such attacks.

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Notes

  1. Difficulty is based on a partial hash collision. The mechanism used to generate the collision is based on varying the nonce field of the block header. As it is a header field, the miner will change it until reaching the partial collision. When the difficulty is set to 1-bit (zero), it is sufficient to find a hash that starts with a zero and any value for the other 255 bits, i.e., 2255 possibilities will be considered valid. If the difficulty is set to 2 bits the possibilities will be reduced to 2254 and so on.

  2. Blocks which were successfully mined but which were not included in the current best blockchain, likely because some other block at the same height had its chain extended first.

  3. Rare and temporary situation

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Funding

This work has been supported in part by, CNPq, Capes, Faperj and Fapesp Grant 2015/24358-7.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Directorate of Communications and Information Technology of the Brazilian Navy, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Vanessa Chicarino & Emanuel Jesus

  2. Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Célio Albuquerque & Antônio Rocha

Authors
  1. Vanessa Chicarino
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  2. Célio Albuquerque
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  3. Emanuel Jesus
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  4. Antônio Rocha
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Correspondence to Vanessa Chicarino or Célio Albuquerque.

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Chicarino, V., Albuquerque, C., Jesus, E. et al. On the detection of selfish mining and stalker attacks in blockchain networks. Ann. Telecommun. 75, 143–152 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-019-00746-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-019-00746-2

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