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Analysis of blockchain protocol against static adversarial miners corrupted by long delay attackers

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Abstract

Bitcoin, which was initially introduced by Nakamoto, is the most disruptive and impactive cryptocurrency. The core Bitcoin technology is the so-called blockchain protocol. In recent years, several studies have focused on rigorous analyses of the security of Nakamoto’s blockchain protocol in an asynchronous network where network delay must be considered. Wei, Yuan, and Zheng investigated the effect of a long delay attack against Nakamoto’s blockchain protocol. However, their proof only holds in the honest miner setting. In this study, we improve Wei, Yuan and Zheng’s result using a stronger model where the adversary can perform long delay attacks and corrupt a certain fraction of the miners. We propose a method to analyze the converge event and demonstrate that the properties of chain growth, common prefix, and chain quality still hold with reasonable parameters in our stronger model.

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Acknowledgements

Quan YUAN and Puwen WEI were supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61502276). Keting JIA was supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFA0303903), National Cryptography Development Fund (Grant No. MMJJ20170121), and Zhejiang Province Key R&D Project (Grant No. 2017C01062). Haiyang XUE was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61602473) and National Cryptography Development Fund (Grant No. MMJJ20170116). We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

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Correspondence to Puwen Wei.

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Yuan, Q., Wei, P., Jia, K. et al. Analysis of blockchain protocol against static adversarial miners corrupted by long delay attackers. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 63, 130104 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-9916-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-9916-5

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