Distributed Hybrid Double-Spending Attack Prevention Mechanism for Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Consensuses

Blockchain technology is a sustainable technology that offers a high level of security for many industrial applications. Blockchain has numerous benefits, such as decentralisation, immutability and tamper-proofing. Blockchain is composed of two processes, namely, mining (the process of adding a new...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Future internet 2021-11, Vol.13 (11), p.285
Main Authors: Akbar, Nur Arifin, Muneer, Amgad, ElHakim, Narmine, Fati, Suliman Mohamed
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
51% attack
Algorithms
Blockchain
consensus mechanism
Cryptography
Currency
Digital currencies
Distributed ledger
double-mining attack
Fault tolerance
Industrial applications
International finance
Internet
Peer to peer computing
Peers
proof of stake
proof of work
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Summary:Blockchain technology is a sustainable technology that offers a high level of security for many industrial applications. Blockchain has numerous benefits, such as decentralisation, immutability and tamper-proofing. Blockchain is composed of two processes, namely, mining (the process of adding a new block or transaction to the global public ledger created by the previous block) and validation (the process of validating the new block added). Several consensus protocols have been introduced to validate blockchain transactions, Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS), which are crucial to cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. However, these consensus protocols are vulnerable to double-spending attacks. Amongst these attacks, the 51% attack is the most prominent because it involves forking a blockchain to conduct double spending. Many attempts have been made to solve this issue, and examples include delayed proof-of-work (PoW) and several Byzantine fault tolerance mechanisms. These attempts, however, suffer from delay issues and unsorted block sequences. This study proposes a hybrid algorithm that combines PoS and PoW mechanisms to provide a fair mining reward to the miner/validator by conducting forking to combine PoW and PoS consensuses. As demonstrated by the experimental results, the proposed algorithm can reduce the possibility of intruders performing double mining because it requires achieving 100% dominance in the network, which is impossible.
ISSN:1999-5903
1999-5903
DOI:10.3390/fi13110285