Optimal Selfish Mining-Based Denial-of-Service Attack

In recent years, Bitcoin has become one of the most popular cryptocurrencies. The most significant mechanism of Bitcoin is PoW (Proof-of-Work), but it also brings opportunities for mining attacks. In our last study, we proposed a Selfish Mining-based Denial-of-Service Attack (SDoS), which can cause serious threats to the Bitcoin system. On this basis, we further put forward three greedier SDoS attack strategies: a competitive greedy SDoS attack strategy ESDoS, a trail greedy SDoS attack strategy TSDoS, a hybrid greedy SDoS attack strategy ETSDoS, and a more public SDoS attack strategy PSDoS. Besides, we also study the adversary’s optimal strategies under different conditions. The experimental results show that if the adversary adopts the SDoS optimal strategy, his revenue increase rate will be further improved and significantly higher than the other existing mining attacks. If the adversary masters 14% of the total mining power, he has a chance to improve his revenue (25% in Selfish Mining, 19.6% in SDoS), and if the adversary masters 15% of the total mining power, he is capable of launching a 51% attack.