A Tractable Probabilistic Approach to Analyze Sybil Attacks in Sharding-Based Blockchain Protocols
This addresses security vulnerabilities in scalable blockchain systems, offering a method to assess attack risks, but it is incremental as it builds on existing probabilistic analysis techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of analyzing security against Sybil attacks in sharding-based blockchain protocols, proposing a tractable probabilistic approach to compute failure probabilities, with results validated through numerical and comparative analysis.
Blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer from scalability issues. Sharding is one of the most promising and leading solutions to scale blockchain. The basic idea behind sharding is to divide the blockchain network into multiple committees, where each processing a separate set of transactions, rather than the entire network processes all transactions. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic approach to analyze the security of sharding-based blockchain protocols. Based on this approach, we investigate the threat of Sybil attacks in these protocols. The key contribution of our paper is a tractable probabilistic approach to accurately compute the failure probability that at least one committee fails and ultimately compute the probability of a successful attack. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a numerical and comparative analysis of the proposed approach with existing approaches.