Analysis of blockchain protocol against static adversarial miners corrupted by long delay attackers

• DOI: 10.1007/s11432-019-9916-5
• Publication Date: 2020-02-15T03:02:24Z
• Authors: Quan Yuan; Puwen Wei; Keting Jia; Haiyang Xue
• Keywords: blockchain; 330; delay; Information Security; bitcoin; consensus protocol; 0101 mathematics; 01 natural sciences; random oracle; 004

Bitcoin, which was initially introduced by Nakamoto, is the most disruptive and impactive cryptocurrency. The core Bitcoin technology is the so-called blockchain protocol. In recent years, several studies have focused onrigorous analyses of the security of Nakamotos blockchain protocol in an asynchronous network wherenetwork delay must be considered. Wei, Yuan, and Zheng investigated the effect of a long delayattack against Nakamotos blockchain protocol. However, their proof only holds in the honest miner setting.In this study, we improve Wei, Yuan and Zhengs result using a stronger model where the adversarycan perform long delay attacks and corrupt a certain fraction of the miners.We propose a method to analyze the convergeevent and demonstrate that the properties of chain growth, common prefix, and chain qualitystill hold with reasonable parameters in our stronger model.