On the Profitability of Selfish Mining Attack Under the Checkpoint Mechanism

Abstract

Though designed with security in mind, blockchains are vulnerable to various kinds of attacks, especially when the network computational power is low. Selfish mining is one of the most rudimentary and notorious attacks, which maliciously renders blocks found by honest miners orphaned by strategically withholding and revealing the found blocks. In this paper, we analyze the profitability of selfish mining under the checkpoint mechanism—a mechanism that has been adopted as a finality gadget by many blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash. We develop a rigorous analysis method and conduct quantitative evaluations in various scenarios to explore the mechanism's suppression effect on selfish mining. The results illustrate that the checkpoint mechanism can restrict the profit of selfish mining and increase the threshold of computational power that makes selfish mining profitable, suggesting that it is a practical defense mechanism against selfish mining.