On the security and performance of Proof of Work blockchains

Arthur Gervais, Ghassan O. Karame, Karl Wüst, Vasileios Glykantzis, Hubert Ritzdorf, Srdjan Čapkun

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    Abstract

    Proof of Work (PoW) powered blockchains currently account for more than 90% of the total market capitalization of existing digital cryptocurrencies. Although the security provisions of Bitcoin have been thoroughly analysed, the security guarantees of variant (forked) PoW blockchains (which were instantiated with different parameters) have not received much attention in the literature. In this paper, we introduce a novel quantitative framework to analyse the security and performance implications of various consensus and network parameters of PoW blockchains. Based on our framework, we devise optimal adversarial strategies for doublespending and selfish mining while taking into account real world constraints such as network propagation, different block sizes, block generation intervals, information propagation mechanism, and the impact of eclipse attacks. Our framework therefore allows us to capture existing PoW-based deployments as well as PoW blockchain variants that are instantiated with different parameters, and to objectively compare the tradeoffs between their performance and security provisions.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationCCS 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
    PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
    Pages3-16
    Number of pages14
    Volume24-28-October-2016
    ISBN (Electronic)9781450341394
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 24 Oct 2016
    Event23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2016 - Vienna, Austria
    Duration: 24 Oct 201628 Oct 2016

    Other

    Other23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2016
    Country/TerritoryAustria
    CityVienna
    Period24/10/1628/10/16

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