On the detection of selfish mining and stalker attacks in blockchain networks

Abstract

The blockchain technology emerged in 2008 as a distributed peer to peer network structure, capable of ensuring security for transactions made using the Bitcoin digital currency, without the need for third party intermediaries to validate them. Although its beginning was linked to cryptocurrencies, its use has diversified over the recent years. There are various projects using the blockchain technology to perform document validation, electronic voting, tokenization of non-perishable goods, and many others. With its increasing use, concern arises with possible attacks that could threaten the integrity of the consensus of the chain. One of the well-known attacks to the blockchain consensus mechanism is the selfish mining attack, in which malicious nodes can deflect their behavior from the standard pattern by not immediately disclosing their newly mined blocks. This malicious behavior can result in a disproportionate share of rewards for those nodes, especially if they have a significant processing power. The goal of this paper is to present a simple heuristic to detect the presence of selfish mining attack (and variants) in blockchain networks that use the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm. The proposal is to signal when the blockchain fork height deviates from the standard, indicating when the network is under the influence of such attacks.