Document Open Access Logo

Profitable Manipulations of Cryptographic Self-Selection Are Statistically Detectable

Authors Linda Cai , Jingyi Liu , S. Matthew Weinberg , Chenghan Zhou

PDF
Thumbnail PDF

File

LIPIcs.AFT.2024.30.pdf
  • Filesize: 0.91 MB
  • 23 pages

Document Identifiers

Author Details

Linda Cai
  • Princeton University, NJ, USA
Jingyi Liu
  • Princeton University, NJ, USA
S. Matthew Weinberg
  • Princeton University, NJ, USA
Chenghan Zhou
  • Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA

Funding

  • Cai, Linda: Supported by a Chainlink Fellowship, and a Ripple UBRI grant.
  • Liu, Jingyi: Supported by a Ripple UBRI grant.
  • Weinberg, S. Matthew: Supported by a Ripple UBRI grant, and NSF CAREER CCF-1942497.
  • Zhou, Chenghan: Supported by a Ripple UBRI grant.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Linda Cai, Jingyi Liu, S. Matthew Weinberg, and Chenghan Zhou. Profitable Manipulations of Cryptographic Self-Selection Are Statistically Detectable. In 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 316, pp. 30:1-30:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.30

Abstract

Cryptographic Self-Selection is a common primitive underlying leader-selection for Proof-of-Stake blockchain protocols. The concept was first popularized in Algorand [Jing Chen and Silvio Micali, 2019], who also observed that the protocol might be manipulable. [Matheus V. X. Ferreira et al., 2022] provide a concrete manipulation that is strictly profitable for a staker of any size (and also prove upper bounds on the gains from manipulation). Separately, [Maryam Bahrani and S. Matthew Weinberg, 2024; Aviv Yaish et al., 2023] initiate the study of undetectable profitable manipulations of consensus protocols with a focus on the seminal Selfish Mining strategy [Eyal and Sirer, 2014] for Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work longest-chain protocol. They design a Selfish Mining variant that, for sufficiently large miners, is strictly profitable yet also indistinguishable to an onlooker from routine latency (that is, a sufficiently large profit-maximizing miner could use their strategy to strictly profit over being honest in a way that still appears to the rest of the network as though everyone is honest but experiencing mildly higher latency. This avoids any risk of negatively impacting the value of the underlying cryptocurrency due to attack detection). We investigate the detectability of profitable manipulations of the canonical cryptographic self-selection leader selection protocol introduced in [Jing Chen and Silvio Micali, 2019] and studied in [Matheus V. X. Ferreira et al., 2022], and establish that for any player with α < (3-√5)/2 ≈ 0.38 fraction of the total stake, every strictly profitable manipulation is statistically detectable. Specifically, we consider an onlooker who sees only the random seed of each round (and does not need to see any other broadcasts by any other players). We show that the distribution of the sequence of random seeds when any player is profitably manipulating the protocol is inconsistent with any distribution that could arise by honest stakers being offline or timing out (for a natural stylized model of honest timeouts).

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Algorithmic game theory and mechanism design
  • Applied computing → Digital cash
Keywords
  • Blockchain
  • Cryptocurrency
  • Proof-of-Stake
  • Strategic Mining
  • Statistical Detection

Metrics

  • Access Statistics
  • Total Accesses (updated on a weekly basis)
    0
    PDF Downloads
    0
    Metadata Views

Related Versions

References

  1. Musab A. Alturki and Grigore Roşu. Statistical model checking of randao’s resilience to pre-computed reveal strategies. In Emil Sekerinski, Nelma Moreira, José N. Oliveira, Daniel Ratiu, Riccardo Guidotti, Marie Farrell, Matt Luckcuck, Diego Marmsoler, José Campos, Troy Astarte, Laure Gonnord, Antonio Cerone, Luis Couto, Brijesh Dongol, Martin Kutrib, Pedro Monteiro, and David Delmas, editors, Formal Methods. FM 2019 International Workshops, pages 337-349, Cham, 2020. Springer International Publishing. Google Scholar
  2. Nick Arnosti and S. Matthew Weinberg. Bitcoin: A natural oligopoly. In Avrim Blum, editor, 10th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference, ITCS 2019, January 10-12, 2019, San Diego, California, USA, volume 124 of LIPIcs, pages 5:1-5:1. Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, 2019. URL: https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPICS.ITCS.2019.5.
  3. Maryam Bahrani and S. Matthew Weinberg. Undetectable selfish mining. In EC '24: The 25rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, New Haven, CT, USA, July 8 - 11, 2024. ACM, 2024. Google Scholar
  4. Jonah Brown-Cohen, Arvind Narayanan, Alexandros Psomas, and S. Matthew Weinberg. Formal barriers to longest-chain proof-of-stake protocols. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC 2019, Phoenix, AZ, USA, June 24-28, 2019., pages 459-473, 2019. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3328526.3329567.
  5. Linda Cai, Jingyi Liu, S. Matthew Weinberg, and Chenghan Zhou. Profitable manipulations of cryptographic self-selection are statistically detectable, 2024. URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.16949.
  6. Miles Carlsten, Harry A. Kalodner, S. Matthew Weinberg, and Arvind Narayanan. On the instability of bitcoin without the block reward. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Vienna, Austria, October 24-28, 2016, pages 154-167, 2016. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/2976749.2978408.
  7. Jing Chen and Silvio Micali. Algorand: A secure and efficient distributed ledger. Theor. Comput. Sci., 777:155-183, 2019. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/J.TCS.2019.02.001.
  8. Vanessa Chicarino, Célio Albuquerque, Emanuel Jesus, and Antônio Rocha. On the detection of selfish mining and stalker attacks in blockchain networks. Annals of Telecommunications, 75(3):143-152, 2020. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-019-00746-2.
  9. Ittay Eyal and Emin Gün Sirer. Majority is not enough: Bitcoin mining is vulnerable. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security, pages 436-454. Springer, 2014. Google Scholar
  10. Matheus V. X. Ferreira, Aadityan Ganesh, Jack Hourigan, Hannah Huh, S. Matthew Weinberg, and Catherine Yu. Computing optimal manipulations in cryptographic self-selection proof-of-stake protocols. In EC '24: The 25rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, New Haven, CT, USA, July 8 - 11, 2024. ACM, 2024. Google Scholar
  11. Matheus V. X. Ferreira, Ye Lin Sally Hahn, S. Matthew Weinberg, and Catherine Yu. Optimal strategic mining against cryptographic self-selection in proof-of-stake. In David M. Pennock, Ilya Segal, and Sven Seuken, editors, EC '22: The 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, Boulder, CO, USA, July 11 - 15, 2022, pages 89-114. ACM, 2022. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3490486.3538337.
  12. Matheus V. X. Ferreira and S. Matthew Weinberg. Proof-of-stake mining games with perfect randomness. In Péter Biró, Shuchi Chawla, and Federico Echenique, editors, EC '21: The 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, Budapest, Hungary, July 18-23, 2021, pages 433-453. ACM, 2021. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3465456.3467636.
  13. Amos Fiat, Anna Karlin, Elias Koutsoupias, and Christos H. Papadimitriou. Energy equilibria in proof-of-work mining. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC 2019, Phoenix, AZ, USA, June 24-28, 2019., pages 489-502, 2019. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3328526.3329630.
  14. Yossi Gilad, Rotem Hemo, Silvio Micali, Georgios Vlachos, and Nickolai Zeldovich. Algorand: Scaling byzantine agreements for cryptocurrencies. In Proceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Shanghai, China, October 28-31, 2017, pages 51-68. ACM, 2017. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3132747.3132757.
  15. Guy Goren and Alexander Spiegelman. Mind the mining. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC 2019, Phoenix, AZ, USA, June 24-28, 2019., pages 475-487, 2019. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3328526.3329566.
  16. Aggelos Kiayias, Elias Koutsoupias, Maria Kyropoulou, and Yiannis Tselekounis. Blockchain mining games. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC '16, Maastricht, The Netherlands, July 24-28, 2016, pages 365-382, 2016. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/2940716.2940773.
  17. Aggelos Kiayias, Alexander Russell, Bernardo David, and Roman Oliynykov. Ouroboros: A provably secure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol. In Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO 2017 - 37th Annual International Cryptology Conference, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, August 20-24, 2017, Proceedings, Part I, pages 357-388, 2017. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63688-7_12.
  18. Sheng-Nan Li, Carlo Campajola, and Claudio J. Tessone. Twisted by the pools: Detection of selfish anomalies in proof-of-work mining. CoRR, abs/2208.05748, 2022. URL: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2208.05748.
  19. Silvio Micali, Michael Rabin, and Salil Vadhan. Verifiable random functions. In 40th annual symposium on foundations of computer science (cat. No. 99CB37039), pages 120-130. IEEE, 1999. Google Scholar
  20. Michael Neuder, Daniel J. Moroz, Rithvik Rao, and David C. Parkes. Defending against malicious reorgs in tezos proof-of-stake. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies, AFT '20, pages 46-58, New York, NY, USA, 2020. Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3419614.3423265.
  21. Ayelet Sapirshtein, Yonatan Sompolinsky, and Aviv Zohar. Optimal selfish mining strategies in bitcoin. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security - 20th International Conference, FC 2016, Christ Church, Barbados, February 22-26, 2016, Revised Selected Papers, pages 515-532, 2016. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54970-4_30.
  22. Zhaojie Wang, Qingzhe Lv, Zhaobo Lu, Yilei Wang, and Shengjie Yue. Forkdec: Accurate detection for selfish mining attacks. Security and Communication Networks, 2021:5959698, 2021. URL: https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/5959698.
  23. Aviv Yaish, Gilad Stern, and Aviv Zohar. Uncle maker: (time)stamping out the competition in ethereum. In Weizhi Meng, Christian Damsgaard Jensen, Cas Cremers, and Engin Kirda, editors, Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2023, Copenhagen, Denmark, November 26-30, 2023, pages 135-149. ACM, 2023. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3576915.3616674.
  24. Aviv Yaish, Saar Tochner, and Aviv Zohar. Blockchain stretching & squeezing: Manipulating time for your best interest. In David M. Pennock, Ilya Segal, and Sven Seuken, editors, EC '22: The 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, Boulder, CO, USA, July 11 - 15, 2022, pages 65-88. ACM, 2022. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3490486.3538250.
Questions / Remarks / Feedback
X

Feedback for Dagstuhl Publishing


Thanks for your feedback!

Feedback submitted

Could not send message

Please try again later or send an E-mail
© 2023-2024 Schloss Dagstuhl – LZI GmbH Imprint Privacy Contact