research-article

On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains

Authors:

Arthur Gervais,

Ghassan O. Karame,

Vasileios Glykantzis,

Hubert Ritzdorf,

Srdjan CapkunAuthors Info & Claims

CCS '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Pages 3 - 16

https://doi.org/10.1145/2976749.2978341

Published: 24 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Proof of Work (PoW) powered blockchains currently account for more than 90% of the total market capitalization of existing digital cryptocurrencies. Although the security provisions of Bitcoin have been thoroughly analysed, the security guarantees of variant (forked) PoW blockchains (which were instantiated with different parameters) have not received much attention in the literature. This opens the question whether existing security analysis of Bitcoin's PoW applies to other implementations which have been instantiated with different consensus and/or network parameters.

In this paper, we introduce a novel quantitative framework to analyse the security and performance implications of various consensus and network parameters of PoW blockchains. Based on our framework, we devise optimal adversarial strategies for double-spending and selfish mining while taking into account real world constraints such as network propagation, different block sizes, block generation intervals, information propagation mechanism, and the impact of eclipse attacks. Our framework therefore allows us to capture existing PoW-based deployments as well as PoW blockchain variants that are instantiated with different parameters, and to objectively compare the tradeoffs between their performance and security provisions.

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https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-6859-6.ch009
Zhao CZhang SWang TLiew S(2025)Bodyless block propagation: TPS fully scalable blockchain with pre-validationFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2024.107516163(107516)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2024.107516
Roberto Martinez Martinez C(2024)Blockchain Mining: Understanding Its Difficulty in Terms of Hashing Algorithm EfficiencyBlockchain - Pioneering the Web3 Infrastructure for an Intelligent Future [Working Title]10.5772/intechopen.1005350Online publication date: 24-May-2024
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Index Terms

On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains
1. Networks
  1. Network performance evaluation
    1. Network simulations
2. Security and privacy
  1. Network security
  2. Systems security
    1. Distributed systems security

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Published In

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

General Chairs:
Edgar Weippl
SBA Research, Austria
,
Stefan Katzenbeisser
TU Darmstadt, CYSEC, Germany
,
Program Chairs:
Christopher Kruegel
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
,
Andrew Myers
Cornell University, USA
,
Shai Halevi
IBM Research, USA

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part 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 components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGSAC: ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control

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Published: 24 October 2016

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SIGSAC

CCS'16: 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

October 24 - 28, 2016

Vienna, Austria

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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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https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-6859-6.ch009
Zhao CZhang SWang TLiew S(2025)Bodyless block propagation: TPS fully scalable blockchain with pre-validationFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2024.107516163(107516)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2024.107516
Roberto Martinez Martinez C(2024)Blockchain Mining: Understanding Its Difficulty in Terms of Hashing Algorithm EfficiencyBlockchain - Pioneering the Web3 Infrastructure for an Intelligent Future [Working Title]10.5772/intechopen.1005350Online publication date: 24-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.1005350
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