Abstract
Bitcoin pool attacks, including withholding block attacks, pose a significant threat to the Bitcoin ecosystem. However, current research on pool attacks is limited to theoretical analysis due to the lack of experimental platforms. This paper presents simuBits, a specialized experimental system designed to analyze the feasibility of mining pool attacks and propose countermeasures. The system simulates a mining pool using a group of miner processes. A new combined attack model of BWH and man-in-the-middle attack is proposed, which is more profitable and stealthy than traditional single attack patterns. A new countermeasure is also proposed that dynamically adjusts the power weight of suspected attackers through putting them into a small sub-pool. Both the combined attacks and the defense strategies were tested in simuBits, and the results confirm that the proposed countermeasure is a feasible way to defend against pool attacks, significantly reducing attackers’ revenues compared to honest mining.
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Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2019QY0800), and the Natural Science Foundation of China (61872255).
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Zhou, Z., Chen, W., Li, L., Zhang, Y. (2023). simuBits: Pool Security Verification of Novel Mining Attacks. In: Zhang, M., Au, M.H., Zhang, Y. (eds) Provable and Practical Security. ProvSec 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14217. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45513-1_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45513-1_23
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