Paper 2020/626

Game theoretical framework for analyzing Blockchains Robustness

Paolo Zappalà, Marianna Belotti, Maria Potop-Butucaru, and Stefano Secci

Abstract

Blockchains systems evolve in complex environments that mix classical patterns of faults (e.g crash faults, transient faults, Byzantine faults, churn) with selfish, rational or irrational behaviors typical to economical systems. In this paper we propose a game theoretical framework in order to formally characterize the robustness of blockchains systems in terms of resilience to rational deviations and immunity to Byzantine behaviors. Our framework includes necessary and sufficient conditions for checking the immunity and resilience of games and a new technique for composing games that preserves the robustness of individual games. We prove the practical interest of our formal framework by characterizing the robustness of three different protocols popular in blockchain systems: a HTLC-based payment scheme (a.k.a. Lightning Network), a side-chain protocol and a cross-chain swap protocol.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Foundations
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
game theoryrobustnessblockchains
Contact author(s)
maria potop-butucaru @ lip6 fr
History
2020-06-03: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2020/626
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/626,
      author = {Paolo Zappalà and Marianna Belotti and Maria Potop-Butucaru and Stefano Secci},
      title = {Game theoretical framework for analyzing Blockchains Robustness},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2020/626},
      year = {2020},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/626}
}
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