TY - GEN
T1 - Game-theoretic analysis of DDoS attacks against bitcoin mining pools
AU - Johnson, Benjamin
AU - Laszka, Aron
AU - Grossklags, Jens
AU - Vasek, Marie
AU - Moore, Tyler
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was partly supported by the Penn State Institute for CyberScience, CyLab at Carnegie Mellon under grant DAAD19-02-1-0389 from the Army Research Office, and the National Science Foundation under ITR award CCF-0424422 (TRUST). We also thank the reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of the paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© IFCA/Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - One of the unique features of the digital currency Bitcoin is that new cash is introduced by so-called miners carrying out resourceintensive proof-of-work operations. To increase their chances of obtaining freshly minted bitcoins, miners typically join pools to collaborate on the computations. However, intense competition among mining pools has recently manifested in two ways. Miners may invest in additional computing resources to increase the likelihood of winning the next mining race. But, at times, a more sinister tactic is also employed: a mining pool may trigger a costly distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to lower the expected success outlook of a competing mining pool. We explore the trade-off between these strategies with a series of game-theoretical models of competition between two pools of varying sizes. We consider differences in costs of investment and attack, as well as uncertainty over whether a DDoS attack will succeed. By characterizing the game’s equilibria, we can draw a number of conclusions. In particular, we find that pools have a greater incentive to attack large pools than small ones. We also observe that larger mining pools have a greater incentive to attack than smaller ones.
AB - One of the unique features of the digital currency Bitcoin is that new cash is introduced by so-called miners carrying out resourceintensive proof-of-work operations. To increase their chances of obtaining freshly minted bitcoins, miners typically join pools to collaborate on the computations. However, intense competition among mining pools has recently manifested in two ways. Miners may invest in additional computing resources to increase the likelihood of winning the next mining race. But, at times, a more sinister tactic is also employed: a mining pool may trigger a costly distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to lower the expected success outlook of a competing mining pool. We explore the trade-off between these strategies with a series of game-theoretical models of competition between two pools of varying sizes. We consider differences in costs of investment and attack, as well as uncertainty over whether a DDoS attack will succeed. By characterizing the game’s equilibria, we can draw a number of conclusions. In particular, we find that pools have a greater incentive to attack large pools than small ones. We also observe that larger mining pools have a greater incentive to attack than smaller ones.
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-662-44774-1_6
DO - 10.1007/978-3-662-44774-1_6
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84910648996
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 72
EP - 86
BT - Financial Cryptography and Data Security - FC 2014 Workshops, BITCOIN and WAHC 2014, Revised Selected Papers
A2 - Brenner, Michael
A2 - Smith, Matthew
A2 - Böhme, Rainer
A2 - Moore, Tyler
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 18th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security
Y2 - 7 March 2014 through 7 March 2014
ER -