Generic Selfish Mining MDP for DAG Protocols

TL;DR

This paper introduces a universal Markov Decision Process framework for analyzing selfish mining strategies across various DAG-based blockchain protocols, enabling automated and comparable strategy derivation.

Contribution

It proposes a modular, generic attack space for DAG protocols, allowing automatic derivation of selfish mining strategies for multiple blockchain systems.

Findings

Supports Ethereum, Fruitchains, and Parallel Proof-of-Work

Enables automated strategy derivation

Facilitates protocol comparison

Abstract

Selfish Mining is strategic rule-breaking to maximize rewards in proof-of-work protocols [3] and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the preferred tool for finding optimal strategies in Bitcoin [4, 10] and similar linear chain protocols [12]. Protocols increasingly adopt non-sequential chain structures [11], for which MDP analysis is more involved [2]. To date, researchers have tailored specific attack spaces for each protocol [2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12]. Assumptions differ, and validating and comparing results is difficult. To overcome this, we propose a generic attack space that supports a wide range of DAG protocols, including Ethereum, Fruitchains, and Parallel Proof-of-Work. Our approach is modular: we specify each protocol as one program, and then derive the Selfish Mining MDPs automatically.