Security Enhancement In Bitcoin Protocol

Abstract

The radical growth of Bitcoin revolutionized the field of digital currencies by offering a secure replacement for online electronic payments like card payments and Internet banking. Notably, Bitcoin has become popular since it maintains the anonymity of the users and enables peer-to-peer instant payments across the world. It is a decentralized money transfer protocol that does transactions without exposing user credentials and does verifications without any third-party intervention. Though it maintains anonymity, decentralization concept introduced vulnerabilities leading to severe security issues like double spending, block withholding and 51% attacks. These issues necessitate security specific enhancements in Bitcoin protocol. Therefore, this paper proposes a method of incorporating criteria check for miners to participate in mining process and a verification process to join the mining pool. The proposed idea mitigates double spending, block withholding, and 51% attacks. Further, a new approach is proposed namely, refining block creation and verification strategy for improving transaction rate without compromising security.