Paper 2019/070
Uncle Traps: Harvesting Rewards in a Queue-based Ethereum Mining Pool
Sam M. Werner, Paul J. Pritz, Alexei Zamyatin, and William J. Knottenbelt
Abstract
Mining pools in Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies allow miners to pool their computational resources as a means of reducing payout variance. In Ethereum, uncle blocks are valid Proof-of-Work solutions which do not become the head of the blockchain, yet yield rewards if later referenced by main chain blocks. Mining pool operators are faced with the non-trivial task of fairly distributing rewards for both block types among pool participants. Inspired by empirical observations, we formally reconstruct a Sybil attack exploiting the uncle block distribution policy in a queue-based mining pool. To ensure fairness of the queue-based payout scheme, we propose a mitigation. We examine the effectiveness of the attack strategy under the current and the proposed policy via a discrete-event simulation. Our findings show that the observed attack can indeed be obviated by altering the current reward scheme.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. In Proc. 12th EAI International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools (VALUETOOLS), 2019
- DOI
- 10.1145/3306309.3306328
- Keywords
- queue-based mining poolsethereumuncle blockssybil attack
- Contact author(s)
- smw16 @ ic ac uk
- History
- 2019-01-25: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2019/070
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/070,
author = {Sam M. Werner and Paul J. Pritz and Alexei Zamyatin and William J. Knottenbelt},
title = {Uncle Traps: Harvesting Rewards in a Queue-based Ethereum Mining Pool},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/070},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.1145/3306309.3306328},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/070}
}
