Denial of Chain: Evaluation and prediction of a novel cyberattack in Blockchain-supported systems

Abstract Blockchain has arisen as a revolutionary technology to provide trust in scenarios where several independent agents must agree about certain information. This characteristic makes Blockchain the perfect technology to operate with future next-generation internet applications, especially when involving critical data. However, assumptions and conditions that make Blockchain a secure technology are not usually considered, so many popular and recent Blockchain-supported proposals (such as only-one-miner solutions) are unsecure in practice due to Blockchain intrinsic vulnerabilities and other technology limitations. In particular, most of these solutions are vulnerable to a novel and unstudied cyberattack: Denial of Chain (DoC). Therefore, in this paper this new cyberattack is defined and studied from a theoretical and experimental point of view. Besides, a framework to predict the occurrence of this new attack is also described. A mathematical model to represent blocks and chains in Blockchain solutions is proposed, and it is employed to create a statistical framework to analyze the novel DoC attack. Simulation instruments (such as Multichain simulators) and real hardware nodes (based on Raspberry Pi computers) are employed to validate the proposed model and framework, and the proposed solutions.