Uncle traps: harvesting rewards in a queue-based ethereum Mining Pool
File(s)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Werner, Sam
Pritz, paul
Zamyatin, alexei
Knottenbelt, William
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Mining pools in Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies allow miners topool their computational resources as a means of reducing payoutvariance. In Ethereum,uncle blocksare valid Proof-of-Work solu-tions which do not become the head of the blockchain, yet yieldrewards if later referenced by main chain blocks. Mining pool opera-tors are faced with the non-trivial task of fairly distributing rewardsfor both block types among pool participants.Inspired by empirical observations, we formally reconstruct aSybil attack exploiting the uncle block distribution policy in a queue-based mining pool. To ensure fairness of the queue-based payoutscheme, we propose a mitigation. We examine the effectiveness ofthe attack strategy under the current and the proposed policy via adiscrete-event simulation. Our findings show that the observed attackcan indeed be obviated by altering the current reward scheme.
Date Issued
2019-03-12
Date Acceptance
2018-12-22
Citation
2019, pp.127-134
Publisher
ACM
Start Page
127
End Page
134
Copyright Statement
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.
Sponsor
Blockchain (GB) Limited
Identifier
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3306309.3306328
Grant Number
N/A
Source
12th EAI International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
Telecommunications
Computer Science
Ethereum Mining Pools
Discrete-event Simulation
Mining Pool Attacks
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2019-03-12
Finish Date
2019-03-15
Coverage Spatial
Palma, Spain
Date Publish Online
2019-03-12