Implications of Dissemination Strategies on the Security of Distributed Ledgers

This paper describes a simulation study on security attacks over Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs). We specifically focus on attacks at the underlying peer-to-peer layer of these systems, that is in charge of disseminating messages containing data and transaction to be spread among all participants. In particular, we consider the Sybil attack, according to which a malicious node creates many Sybils that drop messages coming from a specific attacked node, or even all messages from honest nodes. Our study shows that the selection of the specific dissemination protocol, as well as the amount of connections each peer has, have an influence on the resistance to this attack.Comment: Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains for Distributed Systems (CryBlock 2020

Agent-Based Simulation of Blockchains

In this paper, we describe LUNES-Blockchain, an agent-based simulator of blockchains that is able to exploit Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS) techniques to offer a high level of scalability. To assess the preliminary implementation of our simulator, we provide a simplified modelling of the Bitcoin protocol and we study the effect of a security attack on the consensus protocol in which a set of malicious nodes implements a filtering denial of service (i.e. Sybil Attack). The results confirm the viability of the agent-based modelling of blockchains implemented by means of PADS

Agent-Based Simulation of Blockchains

none3In this paper, we describe LUNES-Blockchain, an agent-based simulator of blockchains that is able to exploit Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS) techniques to offer a high level of scalability. To assess the preliminary implementation of our simulator, we provide a simplified modelling of the Bitcoin protocol and we study the effect of a security attack on the consensus protocol in which a set of malicious nodes implements a filtering denial of service (i.e. Sybil Attack). The results confirm the viability of the agent-based modelling of blockchains implemented by means of PADS.mixedRosa E.; D'Angelo G.; Ferretti S.Rosa, E.; D'Angelo, G.; Ferretti, S