Paper 2015/796
Stubborn Mining: Generalizing Selfish Mining and Combining with an Eclipse Attack
Kartik Nayak, Srijan Kumar, Andrew Miller, and Elaine Shi
Abstract
Selfish mining, originally discovered by Eyal et al.~\cite{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 expand the mining strategy space to include novel ``stubborn'' strategies that, for a large range of parameters, earn the miner more revenue. Consequently, we show that the selfish mining attack is not (in general) optimal. Further, we show how a miner can further amplify its gain by non-trivially composing mining attacks with network-level eclipse attacks. We show, surprisingly, that given the attacker's best strategy, in some cases victims of an eclipse attack can actually benefit from being eclipsed!
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. Minor revision. IEEE Euro SP 2016
- Keywords
- Bitcoincryptographic protocolsSelfish Mining
- Contact author(s)
- kartik @ cs umd edu
- History
- 2016-01-06: revised
- 2015-08-10: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2015/796
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/796,
author = {Kartik Nayak and Srijan Kumar and Andrew Miller and Elaine Shi},
title = {Stubborn Mining: Generalizing Selfish Mining and Combining with an Eclipse Attack},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2015/796},
year = {2015},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/796}
}
