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Tampering with the Delivery of Blocks and Transactions in Bitcoin

Gervais, Arthur; Ritzdorf, Hubert; Karame, Ghassan O; Capkun, Srdjan; (2015) Tampering with the Delivery of Blocks and Transactions in Bitcoin. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. (pp. pp. 692-705). Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): Denver, CO, USA. Green open access

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Abstract

Given the increasing adoption of Bitcoin, the number of transactions and the block sizes within the system are only expected to increase. To sustain its correct operation in spite of its ever-increasing use, Bitcoin implements a number of necessary optimizations and scalability measures. These measures limit the amount of information broadcast in the system to the minimum necessary. In this paper, we show that current scalability measures adopted by Bitcoin come at odds with the security of the system. More specifically, we show that an adversary can exploit these measures in order to effectively delay the propagation of transactions and blocks to specific nodes—without causing a network partitioning in the system. We show that this allows the adversary to easily mount Denial-of-Service attacks, considerably increase its mining advantage in the network, and double-spend transactions in spite of the current countermeasures adopted by Bitcoin. Based on our results, we propose a number of countermeasures in order to enhance the security of Bitcoin without deteriorating its scalability.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Tampering with the Delivery of Blocks and Transactions in Bitcoin
Event: CCS'15: The 22nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1145/2810103.2813655
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1145/2810103.2813655
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10182349
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