Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: A Networking Perspective of Blockchain Security: Modeling, Analysis, and Defense

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

Blockchain has emerged as a "secure by design" technology that can provide security among a group of mutually distrustful nodes without relying on a trusted central authority. The fundamental security of the blockchain is based on distributed consensus, which assumes the system is secure as long as a certain threshold amount (greater than half) of the whole network's computing (or voting) power is honest. However, in reality, many factors can effectively change this threshold, significantly impairing blockchain security. This project aims to address these fundamental security challenges in blockchain technology by developing new theories and systems to gain a deeper understanding and guide the development of new defense solutions. The project team will investigate how clustered power in large mining pools, heterogeneous network connectivity, and malicious peer-to-peer network link manipulation can impact fundamental blockchain security. The external data feed is another fundamental security challenge towards the broader application of blockchain technology. Therefore, another goal of the project is to address the data truthfulness challenge, where external Byzantine sources may supply false inputs to the blockchain applications. The research activities of this project focus on three main thrusts. First, the team will examine the fundamental security properties of blockchain through the lens of modeling and analysis of consensus protocols, network connectivity, and other factors in the system, with the goal of providing quantifiable insights on fairness, liveness, and safety of blockchain operation. Second, the will investigate the use of trusted computing to enable remotely attestable policy-driven software-defined networks for defense and mitigation of routing-based attacks on blockchain. Third, the team will design a novel trustworthy data feed mechanism that leverages decentralized truth discovery and off-chain efficient agreement to address the long-standing data truthfulness challenge for blockchain applications. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.