Paper 2018/239
RepuCoin: Your Reputation is Your Power
Jiangshan Yu and David Kozhaya and Jeremie Decouchant and Paulo Esteves-Verissimo
Abstract
Existing proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrencies cannot tolerate attackers controlling more than 50% of the network's computing power at any time, but assume that such a condition happening is "unlikely". However, recent attack sophistication, e.g., where attackers can rent mining capacity to obtain a majority of computing power temporarily (flash attacks), render this assumption unrealistic. This paper proposes RepuCoin, the first system to provide guarantees even when more than 50% of the system's computing power is temporarily dominated by an attacker. RepuCoin defines a miner's power by its reputation as a function integrated over the entire blockchain, rather than through its sheer computing power which can be obtained relatively quickly and temporarily. As an example, after a single year of operation, RepuCoin can tolerate attacks compromising 51% of the network's computing resources, even if such power stays maliciously seized for almost a whole year. Moreover, RepuCoin provides better resilience to known attacks, compared to existing PoW systems, while achieving a high throughput of 10000 transactions per second.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Keywords
- Blockchaincryptocurrencyblockchain consensus.
- Contact author(s)
- j yu research @ gmail com
- History
- 2019-02-03: last of 4 revisions
- 2018-03-05: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2018/239
- License
-
CC BY