On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains

Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Abstract

Proof of Work (PoW) powered blockchains currently account for more than 90% of the total market capitalization of existing digital cryptocurrencies. Although the security provisions of Bitcoin have been thoroughly analysed, the security guarantees of variant (forked) PoW blockchains (which were instantiated with different parameters) have not received much attention in the literature. This opens the question whether existing security analysis of Bitcoin’s PoW applies to other implementations which have been instantiated with different consensus and/or network parameters.In this paper, we introduce a novel quantitative framework to analyse the security and performance implications of various consensus and network parameters of PoW blockchains. Based on our framework, we devise optimal adversarial strategies for double-spending and selfish mining while taking into account real world constraints such as network propagation, different block sizes, block generation intervals, information propagation mechanism, and the impact of eclipse attacks. Our framework therefore allows us to capture existing PoW-based deployments as well as PoW blockchain variants that are instantiated with different parameters, and to objectively compare the tradeoffs between their performance and security provisions.

Research Area: Decentralized Systems

People

Dr. Arthur Gervais
Doctoral Student (2012 – 2017)
Lecturer, Imperial College
Dr. Ghassan Karame
Doctoral Student (2007 – 2011)
Professor, Ruhr University Bochum 
Dr. Karl Wüst
Doctoral Student (2016 – 2021)
Faculty, CISPA
Dr. Hubert Ritzdorf
Doctoral Student (2012 – 2017)
CTO, ChainSecurity

BibTex

@inproceedings{10.1145/2976749.2978341,
author = {Gervais, Arthur and Karame, Ghassan O. and W\"{u}st, Karl and Glykantzis, Vasileios and Ritzdorf, Hubert and Capkun, Srdjan},
title = {On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains},
year = {2016},
isbn = {9781450341394},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2976749.2978341},
doi = {10.1145/2976749.2978341},
abstract = {Proof of Work (PoW) powered blockchains currently account for more than 90\% of the total market capitalization of existing digital cryptocurrencies. Although the security provisions of Bitcoin have been thoroughly analysed, the security guarantees of variant (forked) PoW blockchains (which were instantiated with different parameters) have not received much attention in the literature. This opens the question whether existing security analysis of Bitcoin's PoW applies to other implementations which have been instantiated with different consensus and/or network parameters.In this paper, we introduce a novel quantitative framework to analyse the security and performance implications of various consensus and network parameters of PoW blockchains. Based on our framework, we devise optimal adversarial strategies for double-spending and selfish mining while taking into account real world constraints such as network propagation, different block sizes, block generation intervals, information propagation mechanism, and the impact of eclipse attacks. Our framework therefore allows us to capture existing PoW-based deployments as well as PoW blockchain variants that are instantiated with different parameters, and to objectively compare the tradeoffs between their performance and security provisions.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security},
pages = {3–16},
numpages = {14},
keywords = {security, performance, blockchain, bitcoin},
location = {Vienna, Austria},
series = {CCS '16}
}

DOI: 10.1145/2976749.2978341