A Jumping Mining Attack and Solution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a jumping mining attack targeting blockchain difficulty adjustment algorithms, demonstrating its effectiveness through modeling and experiments, and proposes an improved DAA scheme to enhance blockchain security.

Contribution

The paper identifies a novel jumping mining attack on DAA, models its impact, and proposes an improved DAA scheme to defend against this attack.

Findings

Jumping mining can exploit DAA to increase miner rewards.

The attack's effectiveness is validated through simulations and real blockchain data.

The improved DAA scheme effectively mitigates the jumping mining attack.

Abstract

Mining is the important part of the blockchain used the proof of work (PoW) on its consensus, looking for the matching block through testing a number of hash calculations. In order to attract more hash computing power, the miner who finds the proper block can obtain some rewards. Actually, these hash calculations ensure that the data of the blockchain is not easily tampered. Thus, the incentive mechanism for mining affects the security of the blockchain directly. This paper presents an approach to attack against the difficulty adjustment algorithm (abbreviated as DAA) used in blockchain mining, which has a direct impact on miners' earnings. In this method, the attack miner jumps between different blockchains to get more benefits than the honest miner who keep mining on only one blockchain. We build a probabilistic model to simulate the time to obtain the next block at different hash computing power called hashrate. Based on this model, we analyze the DAAs of the major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Zcash, and Bitcoin Gold. We further verify the effectiveness of this attack called jumping mining through simulation experiments, and also get the characters for the attack in the public block data of Bitcoin Gold. Finally, we give an improved DAA scheme against this attack. Extensive experiments are provided to support the efficiency of our designed scheme.