Security Analysis on Tangle-based Blockchain through Simulation

TL;DR

This paper conducts a comprehensive security analysis of Tangle-based blockchain systems, evaluating potential attack strategies through simulation to identify vulnerabilities and assess security risks.

Contribution

It introduces a simulation framework for Tangle-based blockchains and systematically analyzes three types of attacks, providing novel insights into their security implications.

Findings

Identified vulnerabilities in Tangle-based systems

Evaluated effectiveness of parasite, double spending, and hybrid attacks

Provided guidelines for improving security in DAG-based blockchains

Abstract

The Tangle-based structure becomes one of the most promising solutions when designing DAG-based blockchain systems. The approach improves the scalability by directly confirming multiple transactions in parallel instead of single blocks in linear. However, the performance gain may bring potential security risks. In this paper, we construct three types of attacks with comprehensive evaluations, namely parasite attack (PS), double spending attack (DS), and hybrid attack (HB). To achieve that, we deconstruct the Tangle-based projects (e.g. IOTA) and abstract the main components to rebuild a simple but flexible network for the simulation. Then, we informally define three smallest actions to build up the attack strategies layer by layer. Based on that, we provide analyses to evaluate different types of attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to provide a comprehensive security analysis of Tangle-based blockchains.