A Poisoning Attack Against Cryptocurrency Mining Pools

Abstract

This paper discusses a potentially serious attack against public crypto-currency mining pools. By deliberately introducing errors under benign miners’ names, this attack can fool the mining pool administrator into punishing any innocent miner; when the top miners are punished, this attack can significantly slow down the overall production of the mining pool. We show that an attacker needs only a small fraction (e.g., one millionth) of the resources of a victim mining pool, which makes this attack scheme very affordable by a less powerful competing mining pool. We experimentally confirm the effectiveness of this attack scheme against a few well-known mining pools such as Minergate and Slush Pool.