Analyze bribery-driven liveness attacks in Proof-of-Stake ledgers
Analyze bribery attacks that target liveness in committee-based Proof-of-Stake blockchains with block-proportional rewards under the paper’s game-theoretic bribery model, determining how abstention or failure to produce/sign blocks (which causes lost rewards) alters parties’ expected utilities and the resulting strategic equilibria.
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Our work also poses various open questions for future work. First, we assume the adversary only wants to break safety. However, bribes could be used to target liveness. A bribed party could try to censor a transaction by not proposing or signing blocks that include it. In this case, abstaining from participation or failing to create a block, which is a liveness violation, results in lost rewards, so the expected block rewards, hence the utility, of a party is affected by the nature of the infraction. Analyzing such liveness attacks is particularly complex and an interesting topic of further exploration.