| Title | Security Attacks on Multi-Stage Proof-of-Work |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Authors | D'Arco, Paolo, Ansaroudi, Zahra Ebadi |
| Conference Name | 2021 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops and other Affiliated Events (PerCom Workshops) |
| Date Published | mar |
| Keywords | bitcoin, blockchain, Conferences, Human Behavior, human factors, incentive compatibility, Metrics, multi-stage, Pervasive computing, Pervasive Computing Security, profitability, proof-of-work, Protocols, pubcrawl, resilience, Resiliency, Scalability, security, security attack, selfish mining |
| Abstract | Multi-stage Proof-of-Work is a recently proposed protocol which extends the Proof-of-Work protocol used in Bitcoin. It splits Proof-of-Work into multiple stages, to achieve a more efficient block generation and a fair reward distribution. In this paper we study some of the Multi-stage Proof-of-Work security vulnerabilities. Precisely, we present two attacks: a Selfish Mining attack and a Selfish Stage-Withholding attack. We show that Multi-stage Proof-of-Work is not secure against a selfish miner owning more than 25% of the network hashing power. Moreover, we show that Selfish Stage-Withholding is a complementary strategy to boost a selfish miner's profitability. |
| DOI | 10.1109/PerComWorkshops51409.2021.9431013 |
| Citation Key | darco_security_2021 |
Security Attacks on Multi-Stage Proof-of-Work