Abstract
The blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that is growing in importance since inception. Besides cryptocurrencies, it has also crossed its boundary inspiring various organizations, enterprises, or business establishments to adopt this technology benefiting from the most innovative security features. The decentralized and immutable aspects have been the key points that endorse blockchain as one of the most secure technologies at the present time. However, in recent times such features seemed to be faded due to new attacking techniques. One of the biggest challenges remains within the consensus protocol itself, which is an essential component to bring all network participants to an agreed state. Cryptocurrencies adopt suitable consensus protocols based on their mining requirement, and Proof of Work (PoW) is the consensus protocol that is being predominated in major cryptocurrencies. Recent consensus protocol-based attacks, such as the 51% attack, Selfish Mining, Miner Bribe Attack, Zero Confirmation Attack, and One Confirmation Attack have been demonstrated feasible. To overcome these attacks, we propose Proof of Adjourn (PoAj), a novel consensus protocol that provides strong protection regardless of attackers hashing capability. After analyzing the 5 major attacks, and current protection techniques indicating the causes of their failure, we compared the PoAj against the most widely used PoW, showing that PoAj is not only able to mitigate the 5 attacks but also attacks relying on having a large amount of hashing power. In addition, the proposed PoAj showed to be an effective approach to mitigate the processing time issue of large-sized transactions. PoAj is not tailored to any particular attack; therefore, it is effective against malicious powerful players. The proposed approach provides a strong barrier not only to current and known attacks but also to future unknown attacks based on different strategies that rely on controlling the majority of the hashing power.
Highlights
Blockchain is an immutable Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that is constructed upon a peer-to-peer (P2P) network forming the data explicit to its participants in real-time [1]
We propose Proof of Adjourn (PoAj), a novel approach to mitigate security issues introduced by the majority hash rate and by inherited weaknesses of the consensus protocol itself
The decentralization can be described in various ways [19]; in simple terms, blockchain can be classified as politically decentralized as it is not controlled by a single authority, and it is architectural decentralized since failure to certain nodes does not affect the network flow; in a logical view, they are centralized as the whole system follows the same approach as a single computer
Summary
Blockchain is an immutable Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that is constructed upon a peer-to-peer (P2P) network forming the data explicit to its participants in real-time [1]. It creates disbelief amongst the miners to be part of the mining process, discourages users from adopting that particular cryptocurrency To solve these problems, we introduce Proof of Adjourn (PoAj), a novel technique to mitigate various attacks. We propose Proof of Adjourn (PoAj), a novel approach to mitigate security issues introduced by the majority hash rate and by inherited weaknesses of the consensus protocol itself.
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