Mining Pool Selection under Block WithHolding Attack
Mining Pool Selection under Block WithHolding Attack
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DOI：
10.3390/app11041617
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发表时间：
2021-02
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
K. Fujita;Yuanyu Zhang;Masahiro Sasabe;S. Kasahara
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
K. Fujita;Yuanyu Zhang;Masahiro Sasabe;S. Kasahara
在目前的工作证明(PoW)区块链系统中，矿工通常组成矿池，以在采矿竞争中与其他池/矿工竞争。组建资金池可以给矿商带来稳定的收入，但会带来两个关键问题。一种是矿池选择，即矿商选择要加入的矿池，以实现收入最大化。另一种是块扣留(BWH)攻击，池可以将其部分散列/挖掘能力注入其他池以获得额外收入，而不会对受攻击池的挖掘过程做出贡献。由于BWH攻击将对池选择产生重大影响，因此本文研究了存在BWH攻击的挖掘池选择问题。特别地，我们将矿工的池选择过程建模为一个进化博弈，并找到博弈的进化稳定状态(即稳定的池种群状态)作为解。以前的研究是从池管理者的角度来研究这个问题，而忽略了来自被攻击池的收入(攻击收入)，导致了不那么准确和有洞察力的发现。然而，这篇文章关注的是矿工的收益，并仔细考虑了攻击收入。为了说明问题是如何解决的，我们考虑了两个矿池的场景，并进一步调查了一个池攻击另一个池的情况以及两个池相互攻击的情况。本文的研究结果表明，池可以通过发起BWH攻击来吸引更多的矿工加入，并且攻击能力对稳定的池人口有显着影响。
In current Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain systems, miners usually form mining pools to compete with other pools/miners in the mining competition. Forming pools can give miners steady revenues but will introduce two critical issues. One is mining pool selection, where miners select the pools to join in order to maximize their revenues. The other is a Block WithHolding (BWH) attack, where pools can inject part of their hash/mining power into other pools to obtain additional revenues without contributing to the mining process of the attacked pools. Reasoning that the BWH attack will have significant impacts on the pool selection, we therefore investigate the mining pool selection issue in the presence of a BWH attack in this paper. In particular, we model the pool selection process of miners as an evolutionary game and find the Evolutionarily Stable States (ESSs) of the game (i.e., stable pool population states) as the solutions. Previous studies investigated this problem from the perspective of pool managers and neglected the revenues from attacked pools (attacking revenues), leading to less accurate and insightful findings. This paper, however, focuses on the payoffs of miners and carefully takes the attacking revenues into consideration. To demonstrate how the problem is solved, we consider the scenario with two mining pools and further investigate the case where one pool attacks the other and the case where the two pools attack each other. The results in this paper show that pools can attract more miners to join by launching a BWH attack and the attack power significantly affects the stable pool populations.