Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2015/796

Stubborn Mining: Generalizing Selfish Mining and Combining with an Eclipse Attack

Kartik Nayak and Srijan Kumar and Andrew Miller and Elaine Shi

Abstract: Selfish mining is a well-known attack where a selfish miner, under certain conditions, can gain a disproportionate share of reward by deviating from the honest behavior.

In this paper, we greatly expand the mining strategy space, and consider a class of stubborn mining strategies where a miner performs better by taking long shot gambles. Consequently, we show that the selfish mining attack is not optimal for a large parameter region.

Further, we show how a miner can further amplify its gain by non-trivially composing mining attacks and network-level attacks. We show that surprisingly, in some strategies desirable for the adversary, victims of an eclipse attack can actually benefit from being eclipsed!

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / Bitcoin

Date: received 8 Aug 2015

Contact author: kartik at cs umd edu

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20150810:154205 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2015/796

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