Defending PoW Blockchains Against Game-Theoretic DoS Attacks: A Rational Strategy Analysis
Summary
Game-theoretic DoS attacks (GDoS, attacks that exploit miners' financial incentives) can damage proof-of-work blockchains (like Bitcoin, which uses computational puzzles to secure transactions) even when attackers control less than 20% of the network's computing power. Rather than changing the blockchain protocol itself, researchers propose a cooperative defense where miners temporarily move their computing resources to larger mining pools during attacks to maintain their earnings and discourage attackers.
Solution / Mitigation
The source proposes a 'cooperative hash-power hopping mechanism in which miners temporarily reallocate hash power to larger pools when under attack to preserve expected payoffs and suppress attacker incentives.' Simulations show this strategy 'reduces attacker revenue gains by more than 20% and prevents throughput degradation across the entire attack range.' However, this is a theoretical proposal presented in a research paper, not an implemented or deployed mitigation in existing systems.
Classification
Original source: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11425840
First tracked: May 14, 2026 at 08:01 PM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 95%