ESM: Selfish mining under ecological footprint

Abstract

By deviating from an honest mining strategy, attackers can obtain additional rewards through mining attacks. Selfish mining is the most well-known mining attack. It includes selfish mining (SM1), optimal selfish mining (∊-optimal), and bribed selfish mining (BSM), etc. The mining models addressed in prior studies, however, are based on the Nakamoto consensus. Therefore, this paper proposes the ESM model (Selfish Mining under Ecological model). Our new model is fully compatible with fewer resource expenditure requirements. Meanwhile, we also describe a novel selfish mining attack that allows the malicious pool to gain additional revenue by using an ESM attack rather than SM1 when its power is less than 25%. Furthermore, we present an EBSM (Bribery Selfish Mining under Ecological) attack that combines ESM together with the bribery attack. As a result, under EBSM, the malicious solo miner has a chance to gain additional revenue. Finally, we undertake quantitative analyses and simulations to assess the effectiveness of our attacks.