【Author】
Hu, Yunhan; Tian, Guohua; Jiang, Anqi; Liu, Shuqin; Wei, Jianghong; Wang, Jianfeng; Tan, Shichong
【Source】COMPUTER STANDARDS & INTERFACES
【Abstract】Consensus mechanism, as the soul-building-block of decentralized settings, enables a series of blockchain applications, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. For better security and soundness, more and more blockchain systems tend to adopt proof-of-authority (PoA) to avoid or alleviate the various security risks caused by their peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. However, the PoA protocol is also vulnerable to cloning attack (CA), which provides a potential pathway for double-spending attack and has not been well solved. In this paper, we propose a heartbeat-based defense scheme to achieve an effective CA detection in PoA blockchians. To this end, we first analyze two PoA algorithms, Aura and Clique, along with their CA. On this basis, we propose a heartbeat-based defense scheme that can detect CA effectively regardless of the underlying consensus algorithm of the blockchain. Then, to avoid the potential efficiency reduction caused by the increase of sealers, we further design an enhanced hierarchical node selection algorithm, in which sealers can challenge partial nodes selected randomly according our strategy to detect CA in an efficient manner. Finally, we theoretically estimate the precision rate model of our scheme and then establish a prototype PoA blockchain system to test the performance of our scheme. As expected, the experiment results are consistent with our theoretical analysis, which powerfully demonstrates the efficiency and practicability of the proposed scheme.
【Keywords】Blockchain; Consensus mechanism; Proof of authority; Cloning attack; Heartbeat-based defense scheme; Hierarchy node selection
【标题】PoA区块链中基于心跳的实用防御方案克隆攻击
【摘要】共识机制作为去中心化设置的灵魂基石，使比特币、以太坊等一系列区块链应用成为可能。为了更好的安全性和稳健性，越来越多的区块链系统倾向于采用权威证明（PoA）来避免或减轻其点对点（P2P）网络带来的各种安全风险。但是，PoA 协议也容易受到克隆攻击（CA）的攻击，这为双花攻击提供了潜在的途径，目前还没有得到很好的解决。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于心跳的防御方案，以在 PoA 区块链中实现有效的 CA 检测。为此，我们首先分析了两个 PoA 算法，Aura 和 Clique，以及它们的 CA。在此基础上，我们提出了一种基于心跳的防御方案，无论区块链底层共识算法如何，都可以有效检测CA。然后，为了避免由于密封器的增加而导致的潜在效率降低，我们进一步设计了一种增强的分层节点选择算法，其中密封器可以挑战根据我们的策略随机选择的部分节点，以有效地检测 CA。最后，我们从理论上估计了我们方案的准确率模型，然后建立了一个原型 PoA 区块链系统来测试我们方案的性能。正如预期的那样，实验结果与我们的理论分析一致，有力地证明了所提出方案的效率和实用性。
【关键词】区块链；共识机制；权威证明；克隆攻击；基于心跳的防御方案；层次节点选择
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