Abstract
Bribery is a perilous issue in the real world, especially in an economical aspect. This fraudulence is unavoidable, and more importantly, it is more difficult to trace in case smart contracts are utilized for bribing on a distributed public blockchain. In our paper, we propose a new threat to the security of a blockchain system, cross-chain bribery using smart contracts. An arbitrary wealthy briber can utilize cross-chain smart contracts to manipulate a consensus mechanism on a victim’s blockchain or to disgrace a victim’s blockchain. To better understand this threat, our paper proposes a framework to analyze bribery using cross-chain smart contracts. We analyze the amount of incentive to bribe rational miners in a victim’s blockchain and also a full cost of conducting a cross-chain bribery attack. The result is that such attacks can be carried out with a reasonable amount of money or cryptocurrencies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Available from: https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/.
References
Ethereum network status. https://ethstats.net
What are the most reliable smart contract platforms?, November 2018. https://www.cointelligence.com/content/smart-contract-platforms-guide/
Bai, Q., Zhou, X., Wang, X., Xu, Y., Wang, X., Kong, Q.: A deep dive into blockchain selfish mining. CoRR arXiv:abs/1811.08263 (2018)
Bonneau, J.: Why buy when you can rent? In: Clark, J., Meiklejohn, S., Ryan, P.Y.A., Wallach, D., Brenner, M., Rohloff, K. (eds.) FC 2016. LNCS, vol. 9604, pp. 19–26. Springer, Heidelberg (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_2
Chen, L., et al.: The game among bribers in a smart contract system. In: Zohar, A., et al. (eds.) FC 2018. LNCS, vol. 10958, pp. 294–307. Springer, Heidelberg (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_20
Chen, L., Xu, L., Gao, Z., Shah, N., Lu, Y., Shi, W.: Smart contract execution - the (+-)-biased ballot problem. In: ISAAC (2017)
Chen, L., Xu, L., Shah, N., Gao, Z., Lu, Y., Shi, W.: Decentralized execution of smart contracts: agent model perspective and its implications. In: Brenner, M., Rohloff, K., Bonneau, J., Miller, A., Ryan, P.Y.A., Teague, V., Bracciali, A., Sala, M., Pintore, F., Jakobsson, M. (eds.) FC 2017. LNCS, vol. 10323, pp. 468–477. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70278-0_29
Christidis, K., Devetsikiotis, M.: Blockchains and smart contracts for the internet of things. IEEE Access 4, 2292–2303 (2016)
Ethereum: ethereum/wiki. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper
Ethereum: ethereum/wiki. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Mining
Eyal, I., Sirer, E.G.: Majority is not enough: bitcoin mining is vulnerable. In: Christin, N., Safavi-Naini, R. (eds.) FC 2014. LNCS, vol. 8437, pp. 436–454. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45472-5_28
Heilman, E., Baldimtsi, F., Goldberg, S.: Blindly signed contracts: anonymous on-blockchain and off-blockchain bitcoin transactions. In: Clark, J., Meiklejohn, S., Ryan, P.Y.A., Wallach, D., Brenner, M., Rohloff, K. (eds.) FC 2016. LNCS, vol. 9604, pp. 43–60. Springer, Heidelberg (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_4
Karamitsos, I., Papadaki, M., Barghuthi, N.B.A.: Design of the blockchain smart contract: a use case for real estate. J. Inf. Secur. 09(03), 177–190 (2018). https://doi.org/10.4236/jis.2018.93013
Kothapalli, A., Cordi, C.: A bribery framework using smartcontracts (2016)
McCorry, P., Hicks, A., Meiklejohn, S.: Smart contracts for bribing miners. In: Zohar, A., Eyal, I., Teague, V., Clark, J., Bracciali, A., Pintore, F., Sala, M. (eds.) FC 2018. LNCS, vol. 10958, pp. 3–18. Springer, Heidelberg (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_1
Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system (2008)
Nakamoto, W.S.: A next generation smart contract & decentralized application platform (2015)
Niu, J., Feng, C.: Selfish mining in ethereum. CoRR arXiv:abs/1901.04620 (2019)
Udokwu, C., Kormiltsyn, A., Thangalimodzi, K., Norta, A.: An exploration of blockchain enabled smart-contracts application in the enterprise (2018). https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.36464.97287
Xu, L., Chen, L., Gao, Z., Lu, Y., Shi, W.: CoC: secure supply chain management system based on public ledger. In: 2017 26th International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN), pp. 1–6 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCN.2017.8038514
Xu, L., Chen, L., Shah, N., Gao, Z., Lu, Y., Shi, W.: DL-BAC. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion - WWW 2017 Companion (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3041021.3053897
Xu, L., et al.: Enabling the sharing economy: privacy respecting contract based on public blockchain, pp. 15–21 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3055518.3055527
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Tran, Q., Chen, L., Xu, L., Lu, Y., Shi, W. (2019). Cross Chain Bribery Contracts: Majority vs Mighty Minority. In: De La Prieta, F., et al. Highlights of Practical Applications of Survivable Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1047. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24299-2_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24299-2_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24298-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24299-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)