Ergodic mean-payo games for the analysis of attacks in crypto-currencies

Chatterjee, K, Goharshady, AK, Ibsen-Jensen, R ORCID: 0000-0003-4783-0389 and Velner, Y (2018) Ergodic mean-payo games for the analysis of attacks in crypto-currencies. Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, LIPIcs, 118. 11:1-11:1.

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Abstract

Crypto-currencies are digital assets designed to work as a medium of exchange, e.g., Bitcoin, but they are susceptible to attacks (dishonest behavior of participants). A framework for the analysis of attacks in crypto-currencies requires (a) modeling of game-theoretic aspects to analyze incentives for deviation from honest behavior; (b) concurrent interactions between participants; and (c) analysis of long-term monetary gains. Traditional game-theoretic approaches for the analysis of security protocols consider either qualitative temporal properties such as safety and termination, or the very special class of one-shot (stateless) games. However, to analyze general attacks on protocols for crypto-currencies, both stateful analysis and quantitative objectives are necessary. In this work our main contributions are as follows: (a) we show how a class of concurrent mean-payo games, namely ergodic games, can model various attacks that arise naturally in crypto-currencies; (b) we present the first practical implementation of algorithms for ergodic games that scales to model realistic problems for crypto-currencies; and (c) we present experimental results showing that our framework can handle games with thousands of states and millions of transitions.

Item Type:	Article
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	06 Dec 2018 09:22
Last Modified:	21 Nov 2023 12:39
DOI:	10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2018.11
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3029561