ZeroBlock: Timestamp-Free Prevention of Block-Withholding Attack in Bitcoin

Abstract: Bitcoin was recently introduced as a peer-to-peer electronic currency in order to facilitate transactions outside the traditional financial system. The core of Bitcoin, the Blockchain, is the history of the transactions in the system maintained by all miners as a distributed shared register. New blocks in the Blockchain contain the last transactions in the system and are added by miners after a block mining process that consists in solving a resource consuming proof-of-work (cryptographic puzzle). The reward is a motivation for mining process but also could be an incentive for attacks such as selfish mining. In this paper we propose a solution for one of the major problems in Bitcoin : selfish mining or block-withholding attack. This attack is conducted by adversarial or selfish miners in order to either earn undue rewards or waste the computational power of honest miners. Contrary to recent solutions, our solution, ZeroBlock, prevents block-withholding using a technique free of timestamp that can be forged. Moreover, we show that our solution is compliant with nodes churn.