Security of the Blockchain against Long Delay Attack

Puwen Wei; Quan Yuan; Yuliang Zheng

Paper 2018/800

Security of the Blockchain against Long Delay Attack

Puwen Wei, Quan Yuan, and Yuliang Zheng

Abstract

The consensus protocol underlying Bitcoin (the blockchain) works remarkably well in practice. However proving its security in a formal setting has been an elusive goal. A recent analytical result by Pass, Seeman and shelat indicates that an idealized blockchain is indeed secure against attacks in an asynchronous network where messages are maliciously delayed by at most $\Delta\ll1/np$, with $n$ being the number of miners and $p$ the mining hardness. This paper improves upon the result by showing that if appropriate inconsistency tolerance is allowed the blockchain can withstand even more powerful external attacks in the honest miner setting. Specifically we prove that the blockchain is secure against long delay attacks with $\Delta\geq1/np$ in an asynchronous network.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Publication info: Published by the IACR in ASIACRYPT 2018
Keywords: bitcoin blockchain delay attack random oracle
Contact author(s): pwei @ sdu edu cn
yuanquan_sdu @ mail sdu edu cn
History: 2018-09-01: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2018/800
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/800,
      author = {Puwen Wei and Quan Yuan and Yuliang Zheng},
      title = {Security of the Blockchain against Long Delay Attack},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2018/800},
      year = {2018},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/800}
}