Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2018/1211

Countering Block Withholding Attack Effciently

Suhyeon Lee and Seungjoo Kim

Abstract: Bitcoin, well-known cryptocurrency, selected Poof-of-Work (PoW) for its security. PoW mechanism incentivizes participants and deters attacks on the network. Bitcoin seems to have operated the stable distributed network with PoW until now. Researchers found, however, some vulnerabilities in PoW such as selfish mining, block withholding attack, and so on. Especially, after Rosenfeld suggested block withholding attack and Eyal made this attack practical, many variants and countermeasures have been proposed. Most countermeasures, however, were accompanied by changes in the mining algorithm to make the attack impossible, which lowered the practical adaptability. In this paper, we propose a countermeasure to prevent block withholding attack effectively. Mining pools can adapt our method without changing their mining environment.

Category / Keywords: applications / blockchain

Date: received 16 Dec 2018, last revised 7 May 2019

Contact author: orion-alpha at korea ac kr

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: The extended version of this paper was published in IEEE INFOCOM Workshop CryBlock 2019

Version: 20190507:121948 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2018/1211