Security Analyses of Misbehavior Tracking in Bitcoin Network
Wenjun Fan, Hsiang-Jen Hong, Simeon Wuthier, Xiaobo Zhou, Yan Zhi Bai, Sang‐Yoon Chang · 2021 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC) · 2021
Because Bitcoin P2P networking is permissionless by the application requirement, it is vulnerable against networking threats based on identity/credential manipulations such as Sybil and spoofing attacks. The current Bitcoin implementation keeps track of its peer's networking misbehaviors through ban score. In this paper, we investigate the security problems of the ban-score mechanism and discover that the ban score is not only ineffective against the Bitcoin Message-based DoS attacks but also vulnerable to a Defamation attack. In the Defamation attack, the network adversary can exploit the ban-score mechanism to defame innocent peers.