New Game-Theoretic Analysis of DDoS Attacks Against Bitcoin Mining Pools with Defence Cost

Abstract

Since almost all new bitcoins nowadays are minted by mining pools, the security of mining pools is quite crucial to the health of the Bitcoin system. Among the attacks targeting at mining pools, the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is the notable one. Previous research shows that mining pools would launch DDoS attacks on others when the size is relatively large. However, no mining pools claimed responsibility to any DDoS attacks on mining pools till now. In this paper, we revise the previous game-theoretic analysis model by adding DDoS defense cost. With the assumption that the whole computing resource of any mining pool consists of mining, defense and attack, we obtain some interesting conclusions. (1) If the failure probability of DDoS attack is high, then mining pools would have a greater incentive to stay peacefully. (2) Increasing the computing resource in mining is always the primary choice for mining pools, no matter whether they are launching DDoS attacks or under DDoS attacks.