Distributed Ledger Technology for IoT: Parasite Chain Attacks
This work addresses security vulnerabilities in IoT systems using DAG-based ledgers, but it is incremental as it builds upon existing IOTA methods.
The paper tackled the problem of parasite chain attacks on IOTA's DAG-based distributed ledger for IoT by analyzing the efficacy of its core MCMC algorithm and proposing an extension that improves resistance to such attacks.
Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based Distributed Ledgers can be useful in a number of applications in the IoT domain. A distributed ledger should serve as an immutable and irreversible record of transactions, however, a DAG structure is a more complicated mathematical object than its blockchain counterparts, and as a result, providing guarantees of immutability and irreversibility is more involved. In this paper, we analyse a commonly discussed attack scenario known as a parasite chain attack for the IOTA Foundation DAG based ledger. We analyse the efficacy of IOTA core MCMC algorithm using a matrix model and present an extension which improves the ledger resistance to these attacks.