An Evaluation of Uncle Block Mechanism Effect on Ethereum Selfish and Stubborn Mining Combined With an Eclipse Attack

Abstract

Ethereum accelerates the transaction process through a quicker block creation design. Since the time interval between the generation of blocks is very short (about 15s), block propagation time in an inefficient network is not negligible compared with the block time interval. This lead to the production of a large number of orphan blocks. In order to solve the security problems that may be caused by the orphan block and improve the transaction processing efficiency, Ethereum introduces the uncle block mechanism, i.e., an orphan block may get part of minted reward if it gets a reference by a regular block. In this paper, we show the weakness of the uncle block mechanism. Firstly, we describe the specific differences of Ethereum selfish and stubborn mining in every state from the ones in Bitcoin. Secondly, we simulate possible attacks, and the results show that the Ethereum selfish and stubborn mining strategies not only increase the reward of an attacker but also decrease the security threshold. The security threshold refers to the proportion of the attacker's computational power that needs to be achieved in order to obtain a higher reward than he should. In a practical network congestion rate, the security threshold are weakened to 0.129 and 0.216 against the Lead stubborn mining strategy and the original selfish mining strategy, respectively. When the congestion rate is rising, the reward is increasing and the threshold is decreasing. Thirdly, possible strategies are evaluated to find out the optimal one in different settings. Fourthly, we also extend the evaluation by combining three eclipse attack strategies with selfish or stubborn mining. Most of combinations bring more advantages to an attacker than a single strategy.