New Reputation-Based Mining Paradigm: Incentivizing Blockchain Miners to Avoid Dishonest Mining Strategies
Abstract
Verification of transactions in the context of digital currencies (e.g., Bitcoin) is very resource intensive, therefore, verifiers (a.k.a., miners) form coalitions (a.k.a., mining pools) to verify each block of transactions in return of a reward where only the first mining pool that accomplishes the verification process will be rewarded. This leads to intense competitions among miners and consequently dishonest mining strategies such as the block withholding attack, selfish mining, eclipse attack, stubborn mining, to name a few. As such, it is necessary to regulate the mining process in the Blockchain or similar frameworks to make the miners accountable for dishonest mining behaviors. This is a prominent security concern as the concept of the Blockchain/public ledger is becoming a popular security solution in other contexts, e.g., smart contracts or information sharing. We therefore propose a new reputation-based paradigm for the proof-of-work computation in the Blockchain in which the miners not only are incentivized to conduct honest mining but also disincentivized to commit to any malicious activities against other mining pools. In our initial setting, a mining game is repeatedly played among a set of pool managers and miners where the reputation of each miner (or mining ally) is continuously measured by monitoring the miner s behavior. At each round of the game, the pool managers send invitations only to a subset of miners based on a non-uniform probability distribution defined by the miners reputation values. As a result, it will not be in the best interest of the miners to employ dishonest mining strategies even by gaining a short-term utility. This is due to the consideration of a long-term utility in our model and its impact on the miners utilities overtime. We therefore aim at four primary objectives during the course of the proposed project based on our preliminary design and theoretical analyses. Our first objective is to conduct research on detection mechanisms of adversarial activities that may happen during the mining process. Our next goal is to construct resistant trust models and reputation systems for the proposed mining paradigm. Our subsequent purpose is to implement the new reputation-based mining paradigm similar to an actual setting. Our final objective is to analyze the new mining scheme through experimental and theoretical analyses using real data from the Bitcoin network.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Feb 19, 2019
- Source ID
- W911NF1810483
Entities
People
- Mehrdad Nojoumian
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- Florida Atlantic University
- Office of the Secretary of Defense