Paper 2018/836
Pitchforks in Cryptocurrencies: Enforcing rule changes through offensive forking- and consensus techniques
Abstract
The increasing number of cryptocurrencies, as well as the rising number of actors within each single cryptocurrency, inevitably leads to tensions between the respective communities. As with open source projects, (protocol) forks are often the result of broad disagreement. Usually, after a permanent fork both communities ``mine'' their own business and the conflict is resolved. But what if this is not the case? In this paper, we outline the possibility of malicious forking and consensus techniques that aim at destroying the other branch of a protocol fork. Thereby, we illustrate how merged mining can be used as an attack method against a permissionless PoW cryptocurrency, which itself involuntarily serves as the parent chain for an attacking merge mined branch of a hard fork.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. ESORICS CBT 2018
- Contact author(s)
- ajudmayer @ sba-research org
- History
- 2022-06-07: revised
- 2018-09-06: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2018/836
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/836,
author = {Aljosha Judmayer and Nicholas Stifter and Philipp Schindler and Edgar Weippl},
title = {Pitchforks in Cryptocurrencies: Enforcing rule changes through offensive forking- and consensus techniques},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2018/836},
year = {2018},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/836}
}
