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On the Security and Scalability of Bitcoin's Blockchain

Published: 24 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

The blockchain emerges as an innovative tool which proves to be useful in a number of application scenarios. A number of large industrial players, such as IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and NEC, are currently investing in exploiting the blockchain in order to enrich their portfolio of products. A number of researchers and practitioners speculate that the blockchain technology can change the way we see a number of online applications today. Although it is still early to tell for sure, it is expected that the blockchain will stimulate considerable changes to a large number of products and will positively impact the digital experience of many individuals around the globe. In this tutorial, we overview, detail, and analyze the security provisions of Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain-effectively capturing recently reported attacks and threats in the system. Our contributions go beyond the mere analysis of reported vulnerabilities of Bitcoin; namely, we describe and evaluate a number of countermeasures to deter threats on the system-some of which have already been incorporated in the system. Recall that Bitcoin has been forked multiple times in order to fine-tune the consensus (i.e., the block generation time and the hash function), and the network parameters (e.g., the size of blocks). As such, the results reported in this tutorial are not only restricted to Bitcoin, but equally apply to a number of "altcoins" which are basically clones/forks of the Bitcoin source code. Given the increasing number of alternative blockchain proposals, this tutorial extracts the basic security lessons learnt from the Bitcoin system with the aim to foster better designs and analysis of next-generation secure blockchain currencies and technologies.

References

[1]
Arthur Gervais, Ghassan Karame, Srdjan Capkun, and Vedran Capkun. Is bitcoin a decentralized currency? In IEEE Security and Privacy, 2014.
[2]
Arthur Gervais, Hubert Ritzdorf, Ghassan O Karame, and Srdjan Capkun. Tampering with the delivery of blocks and transactions in bitcoin. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pages 692--705. ACM, 2015.
[3]
E. Heilman, A. Kendler, A. Zohar, and S. Goldberg. Eclipse attacks on bitcoin's peer-to-peer network. 2015.
[4]
Ghassan O. Karame, Elli Androulaki, and Srdjan Capkun. Double-spending fast payments in bitcoin. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security, CCS '12, New York, NY, USA, 2012. ACM.

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  1. On the Security and Scalability of Bitcoin's Blockchain

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CCS '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
      October 2016
      1924 pages
      ISBN:9781450341394
      DOI:10.1145/2976749
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      Publication History

      Published: 24 October 2016

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      Author Tags

      1. bitcoin security
      2. blockchain security

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      CCS '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 137 of 831 submissions, 16%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

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      Cited By

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      • (2025)Blockchain Consensus Scheme Based on the Proof of Distributed Deep Learning WorkIET Software10.1049/sfw2/33783832025:1Online publication date: 21-Jan-2025
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      • (2024)Using the Blockchain to Reduce Carbon Emissions in the Visitor EconomySustainability10.3390/su1610400016:10(4000)Online publication date: 10-May-2024
      • (2024)Towards data storage scheme in blockchain based serverless environment: AES encryption and decryption algorithm approachFacta universitatis - series: Electronics and Energetics10.2298/FUEE2402317K37:2(317-342)Online publication date: 2024
      • (2024)Blockchains: Fusing Platform Functionalities Under the CAP TradeoffSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4748826Online publication date: 2024
      • (2024)Improved Ethereum Fraud Detection Mechanism with Explainable Tabular Transformer Model2024 IEEE 6th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems, and Applications (TPS-ISA)10.1109/TPS-ISA62245.2024.00017(59-68)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
      • (2024)Security Management Method of Public Sentiment Analysis Based on Blockchain and Edge ComputingIEEE Transactions on Cybernetics10.1109/TCYB.2024.340392354:11(6397-6409)Online publication date: Nov-2024
      • (2024)Scale Wisely, Secure Wholly: P2P Swarm Learning Over Consortium Blockchain in Edge NetworksICC 2024 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10622902(4596-4601)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
      • (2024)Investigating various cryptocurrency research trends: an analysis employing text mining and topic modelingGlobal Knowledge, Memory and Communication10.1108/GKMC-02-2024-0073Online publication date: 22-Aug-2024
      • (2024)To a Decentralized Future: Benefits that Blockchain Could Endow the Financing WorldProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Economic Management and Green Development10.1007/978-981-97-0523-8_61(642-651)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2024
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