When Should Selfish Miners Double-Spend?

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Hauptverfasser: Doger, Mustafa, Ulukus, Sennur
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Doger, Mustafa
Ulukus, Sennur
author_facet Doger, Mustafa
Ulukus, Sennur
contents Conventional double-spending attack models ignore the revenue losses stemming from the orphan blocks. On the other hand, selfish mining literature usually ignores the chance of the attacker to double-spend at no-cost in each attack cycle. In this paper, we give a rigorous stochastic analysis of an attack where the goal of the adversary is to double-spend while mining selfishly. To do so, we first combine stubborn and selfish mining attacks, \textit{i.e.}, construct a strategy where the attacker acts stubborn until its private branch reaches a certain length and then switches to act selfish. We provide the optimal stubbornness for each parameter regime. Next, we provide the maximum stubbornness that is still more profitable than honest mining and argue a connection between the level of stubbornness and the $k$-confirmation rule. We show that, at each attack cycle, if the level of stubbornness is higher than $k$, the adversary gets a free shot at double-spending. At each cycle, for a given stubbornness level, we rigorously formulate how great the probability of double-spending is. We further modify the attack in the stubborn regime in order to conceal the attack and increase the double-spending probability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_03227
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When Should Selfish Miners Double-Spend?
Doger, Mustafa
Ulukus, Sennur
Cryptography and Security
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Discrete Mathematics
Information Theory
Probability
Conventional double-spending attack models ignore the revenue losses stemming from the orphan blocks. On the other hand, selfish mining literature usually ignores the chance of the attacker to double-spend at no-cost in each attack cycle. In this paper, we give a rigorous stochastic analysis of an attack where the goal of the adversary is to double-spend while mining selfishly. To do so, we first combine stubborn and selfish mining attacks, \textit{i.e.}, construct a strategy where the attacker acts stubborn until its private branch reaches a certain length and then switches to act selfish. We provide the optimal stubbornness for each parameter regime. Next, we provide the maximum stubbornness that is still more profitable than honest mining and argue a connection between the level of stubbornness and the $k$-confirmation rule. We show that, at each attack cycle, if the level of stubbornness is higher than $k$, the adversary gets a free shot at double-spending. At each cycle, for a given stubbornness level, we rigorously formulate how great the probability of double-spending is. We further modify the attack in the stubborn regime in order to conceal the attack and increase the double-spending probability.
title When Should Selfish Miners Double-Spend?
topic Cryptography and Security
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Discrete Mathematics
Information Theory
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03227