Efficient Detection of Selfish Mining Attacks on Large-Scale Blockchain Networks

Abstract

Selfish mining attacks pose a significant and ongoing security threat to blockchain networks, including major platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Understanding and effectively countering these attacks is crucial for maintaining the stability and integrity of these networks. This attack strategy involves a miner or a group of miners seeking to gain an advantage by delaying the immediate broadcasting of their mined blocks to the network. The selfish miners potentially mine more blocks in secret, increasing their rewards at the expense of other miners and the stability of the blockchain. Research has mainly focused on detecting this attack by analyzing data related to blocks and forks. This paper presents a new approach to efficiently detect selfish mining attacks in large-scale networks by analyzing various network indicators. To achieve this, we simulate a Bitcoin network and generate a dataset consisting of several features of individual miners and the overall network. We select the most reliable indicators by analyzing network features and reducing feature dimensions. Then, we employ random forest classification (RFC) to classify benign and selfish network behaviors. This approach not only achieves enhanced accuracy (99.96%), surpassing state-of-the-art methods utilizing deep learning, but also significantly reduces computational, storage, and temporal complexities. In doing so, it fortifies blockchain security more efficiently and accurately.