Blockchain is a “decentralized” system, where the security heavily depends on that of the consensus protocols. For instance, attackers gain illegal revenues by leveraging the vulnerabilities of the consensus protocols. Such attacks consist of selfish mining (SM1), optimal selfish mining ( ‐optimal), bribery selfish mining (BSM), and so forth. In existing works, the attacks only consider the circumstances, where part of miners are rational. However, miners are hardly nonrational in the blockchain system since they hope to maximize their revenues. Furthermore, attackers prefer intelligent tools to increase their power for more additional revenues. Therefore, new models are urgently needed to formulate the scenarios, where attackers are purely rational and intelligent. In this paper, we propose a new BSM model, where all miners are rational. Moreover, rational attackers are intelligent such that they optimize their strategies by utilizing reinforcement learning to boost their revenues. More specifically, we propose a new selfish mining algorithm: intelligent bribery selfish mining (IPBSM), where attackers choose optimal strategies resorting to reinforcement learning when they interact with the external environment. The external environment can be further modeled as a Markov decision process to facilitate the construction of reinforcement learning. The simulation results manifest that IPBSM, compared with SM1 and ‐optimal, has lower power thresholds and higher revenues. Therefore, IPBSM is a threat no to be neglected to the blockchain system.
1 September 2020 in International Journal of Intelligent Systems
The development of Internet of Things (IoT) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has led to close cooperation between electronic devices. It requires strong reliability and trustworthiness of the devices involved in the communication. However, current trust mechanisms have the following issues: (1) heavily relying on a trusted third party, which may incur severe security issues if it is corrupted, and (2) malicious evaluations on the involved devices which may bias the trustrank of the devices. By introducing the concepts of risk management and blockchain into the trust mechanism, we here propose a blockchain-based trust mechanism for distributed IoT devices in this paper. In the proposed trust mechanism, trustrank is quantified by normative trust and risk measures, and a new storage structure is designed for the domain administration manager to identify and delete the malicious evaluations of the devices. Evidence shows that the proposed trust mechanism can ensure data sharing and integrity, in addition to its resistance against malicious attacks to the IoT devices.