A New Game-Theoretic Analysis of DDoS Attacks Against Bitcoin Mining Pools with Defense Cost

EasyChair Preprint 1514

Abstract

Since almost all new bitcoins nowadays are minted by mining pools, the security of mining pools is quite crucial to the health of the Bitcoin system. Among the attacks targeting mining pools, the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is the notable one. Previous research shows that mining pools would launch DDoS attacks on others when the size is relatively large. However, no mining pools claimed responsibility to any DDoS attacks on mining pools till now. In this paper, we refine the previous game-theoretic analysis model by adding a DDoS defense cost, which makes the success possibility of DDoS attacks dynamic. With the modified model, we obtain some new conclusions. More mining cost less attack possibility. We also observe that mining pools will not launch DDoS attacks to others if the success possibility is not large enough.

Keyphrases: Blockchain, DDoS, game theory, mining pool

@booklet{EasyChair:1514,
  author    = {Cuiwen Ying and Rongxin Zheng and Jun Shao and Guiyi Wei and Jianming Kong and Yekun Ren and Hang Zhang and Weiguang Hou},
  title     = {A New Game-Theoretic Analysis of DDoS Attacks Against Bitcoin Mining Pools with Defense Cost},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1514},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}