Secure Access Control for DAG-based Distributed Ledgers
This work addresses security and fairness issues in distributed ledgers for blockchain and network systems, but it is incremental as it builds on an existing protocol.
The paper tackled security vulnerabilities in a DAG-based distributed ledger access control protocol by identifying attack scenarios and enhancing resilience with features like a reputation-weighted blacklisting algorithm, solidification requests, and timestamps, resulting in improved robustness against spamming and multi-rate attackers as demonstrated through simulations.
Access control is a fundamental component of the design of distributed ledgers, influencing many aspects of their design, such as fairness, efficiency, traditional notions of network security, and adversarial attacks such as Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. In this work, we consider the security of a recently proposed access control protocol for Directed Acyclic Graph-based distributed ledgers. We present a number of attack scenarios and potential vulnerabilities of the protocol and introduce a number of additional features which enhance its resilience. Specifically, a blacklisting algorithm, which is based on a reputation-weighted threshold, is introduced to handle both spamming and multi-rate malicious attackers. The introduction of a solidification request component is also introduced to ensure the fairness and consistency of network in the presence of attacks. Finally, a timestamp component is also introduced to maintain the consistency of the network in the presence of multi-rate attackers. Simulations to illustrate the efficacy and robustness of the revised protocol are also described.