Eclipse-based Stake-Bleeding Attacks in PoS Blockchain Systems

Abstract

A stake-bleeding attack is a newly proposed form of long-range attacks against Proof of Stake (PoS) based blockchain systems. However, as shown in this paper, with the decrease of transaction fees in current PoS based blockchain systems, adversaries require several decades to complete this attack, which is unrealistic. In this paper, we make an improvement on the stake-bleeding attack. We propose an eclipse-based stake-bleeding attack that reduces the attack completion time significantly, e.g., the proposed attack only requires 2.4 years of the attack completion time, while the original stake-bleeding attack needs 22.9 years for the successful attack. We also present a preliminary analysis result on the minimum time to complete the proposed attack.