A Selfish Attack on Chainweb Blockchain

It is well known that the Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchain scheme, first introduced in Bitcoin system, is not scalable, where the PoW implementation limits the transaction processing rate. In recent years, parallel chain techniques have been proposed to overcome this issue. Chainweb is one of the parallel chains to be studied in this paper with a focus on security related issues. It is worth noting that existing blockchain security studies mainly focus on traditional single-chain based protocols. There are not many security related studies on parallel blockchains. This paper for the first time reveals that selfish mining attack is possible on Chainweb blockchain, to the best of our knowledge. Specifically, we propose a selfish mining attack that exclusively mines blocks on a subset of parallel chains with the same block height and achieves gain through a proper withholding strategy. We develop a mathematical model to quantitatively evaluate the performance and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack. Our results show that the attacker can gain extra mining reward when his computational power is at least 38% of the total power in Chainweb network. Under the 50% computational power restriction, the attacker's extra gain increases monotonically with its computational power.