Selfish Mining Attacks on Blockchains, Visualized

Mining Backend

This repo provides code for directly simulating a selfish mining attack on a real, simplified blockchain. Blocks are actually mined using their hashes, and mining order is determined by the relative hash power of each miner. This code supports an unlimited number of honest and adversarial miners (given that their fractional hash power sums to 1).

• To run the mining backend, first install the python libraries in mining/requirements.txt.
• Next, run python mining/server.py

Endpoints

GET /start (Start Mining with defaults)

POST /start (Start Mining with Custom Params)

Body (As JSON)

name	type	data type	description
honest_power	required	list[int]	List of honest mining powers
adversarial_power	required	list[int]	List of adversarial mining powers
^^ Must sum to 1
difficulty	optional	str	Difficulty, EX: 0000ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

Example:

{"honest_power":[0.2,0.1], "adversarial_power":[0.7], "difficulty":"ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"}

Responses

http code	content-type	response
200	text/plain;charset=UTF-8	Started!
400	application/json	Hash power does not sum to 1

GET /stop (Stop Mining)

GET /restart (Restart Mining - Call /start afterwards)

GET /blockchain (Get String representation of the Blockchain)

GET /chain-quality (Get chain quality as a decimal)

GET /longest-chain (Get block hashes of the longest chain)

Visualization

Setup

1. Install packages with npm install
2. Start the development server with npm run dev

Usage

• Set the mining difficulty (higher leads to longer mining time)
• Add some number of miners, set their hash powers as fractions which sum to 1, and choose which should be adversarial
• Start mining, and stop mining to change simulation parameters again
• The gray block is the genesis block
• White blocks are blocks mined by honest nodes
• Red blocks are published blocks mined by adversarial nodes
• Yellow blocks are unpublished blocks mined by adversarial nodes
• Block numbers are effectively the miner address, referring to the nth honest or adversarial miner