TY - GEN
T1 - Unveiling Vulnerabilities in Bitcoin's Misbehavior-Score Mechanism
T2 - 19th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, ARES 2024
AU - Zou, Yuwen
AU - Fan, Wenjun
AU - Ma, Zhen
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 ACM.
PY - 2024/8/30
Y1 - 2024/8/30
N2 - The Bitcoin network is susceptible to various attacks due to its openness, decentralization, and plaintext connections. Bitcoin created a misbehavior-score mechanism for monitoring and tracking peer misconduct. In this paper, we uncover several vulnerabilities of this mechanism, leading to potential Bitcoin-Message-based Denial-of-Service (BitMsg-DoS) attacks on Bitcoin nodes and Slander attacks by maligning innocent nodes. We prototype these attacks for our experiments by testing real nodes connected to the Bitcoin main network (while we do not exfiltrate our attacks to the real-world main network). The experimental results show that the attacks exert varying degrees of impact on mining and non-mining nodes, notably reducing mining rates by up to half for affected mining nodes and decreasing the synchronization speed of blocks for non-mining nodes. To address these drawbacks, this study proposes corresponding countermeasures targeting the identified vulnerabilities in the misbehavior-score mechanism. Furthermore, we explore the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) encrypted transport protocol with experimental support in the latest Bitcoin Core 26.0, but find it insufficient in mitigating the Slander attacks.
AB - The Bitcoin network is susceptible to various attacks due to its openness, decentralization, and plaintext connections. Bitcoin created a misbehavior-score mechanism for monitoring and tracking peer misconduct. In this paper, we uncover several vulnerabilities of this mechanism, leading to potential Bitcoin-Message-based Denial-of-Service (BitMsg-DoS) attacks on Bitcoin nodes and Slander attacks by maligning innocent nodes. We prototype these attacks for our experiments by testing real nodes connected to the Bitcoin main network (while we do not exfiltrate our attacks to the real-world main network). The experimental results show that the attacks exert varying degrees of impact on mining and non-mining nodes, notably reducing mining rates by up to half for affected mining nodes and decreasing the synchronization speed of blocks for non-mining nodes. To address these drawbacks, this study proposes corresponding countermeasures targeting the identified vulnerabilities in the misbehavior-score mechanism. Furthermore, we explore the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) encrypted transport protocol with experimental support in the latest Bitcoin Core 26.0, but find it insufficient in mitigating the Slander attacks.
KW - Bitcoin
KW - Blockchain Security
KW - DoS Attack
KW - Misbehavior-Score Mechanism
KW - P2P Network
KW - Slander Attack
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85200393393&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3664476.3664509
DO - 10.1145/3664476.3664509
M3 - Conference Proceeding
AN - SCOPUS:85200393393
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
BT - ARES 2024 - 19th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, Proceedings
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 30 July 2024 through 2 August 2024
ER -