Visible to the public Parasite Chain Attack Detection in the IOTA Network

TitleParasite Chain Attack Detection in the IOTA Network
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2022
AuthorsGhaffaripour, Shadan, Miri, Ali
Conference Name2022 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC)
Keywordsanomaly detection, blockchain, blockchains, Chained Attacks, directed acyclic graph, distributed ledger, Double-spend Attack, dynamic graph, Image edge detection, Internet of Things, IOTA, mobile computing, Parasite Chain, pubcrawl, resilience, Resiliency, Scalability, Tangle, Wireless communication
AbstractDistributed ledger technologies (DLTs) based on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) have been gaining much attention due to their performance advantage over the traditional blockchain. IOTA is an example of DAG-based DLT that has shown its significance in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment. Despite that, IOTA is vulnerable to double-spend attacks, which threaten the immutability of the ledger. In this paper, we propose an efficient yet simple method for detecting a parasite chain, which is one form of attempting a double-spend attack in the IOTA network. In our method, a score function measuring the importance of each transaction in the IOTA network is employed. Any abrupt change in the importance of a transaction is reflected in the 1st and 2nd order derivatives of this score function, and therefore used in the calculation of an anomaly score. Due to how the score function is formulated, this anomaly score can be used in the detection of a particular type of parasite chain, characterized by sudden changes in the in-degree of a transaction in the IOTA graph. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is accurate and linearly scalable in the number of edges in the network.
NotesISSN: 2376-6506
DOI10.1109/IWCMC55113.2022.9824318
Citation Keyghaffaripour_parasite_2022