PDoS: A Profitable Denial-of-Service Attack against Proof-of-Work Blockchain Liveness
PDoS attack disrupts Proof-of-Work blockchain liveness profitably by combining miner deterrence signals with parasitic revenue extraction from victim pools.
PDoS is a hybrid incentive-driven denial-of-service attack that combines block header signal deterrence with parasitic revenue extraction from a victim pool's share-reward mechanism. By subsidizing attack costs through the victim pool, it lowers the hash-power threshold required to induce rational miners to shut down, unlike prior attacks such as BDoS that demand sustained attacker losses. The authors show a counterintuitive result: in high-fee or high-MEV environments, higher block value increases the attacker's parasitic revenue and can push the attack past break-even into a self-sustaining or even profitable regime. PDoS is claimed as the first attack demonstrating that disrupting PoW blockchain liveness can be economically self-sustaining.
- First PoW liveness attack claimed to be economically self-sustaining or profitable
- Parasitizes victim pool share-reward mechanisms to subsidize attack costs
- Lowers hash-power threshold for deterring rational miners versus BDoS
- High-fee, high-MEV environments can make PoW systems less secure
Full article177 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
The security and liveness of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains fundamentally depend on the economic rationality of miners. Existing incentive-driven denial-of-service attacks, such as BDoS, can deter rational miners from participating, but require the attacker to continuously absorb substantial economic losses and are therefore difficult to sustain in high-value networks. Meanwhile, prior infiltration-based withholding attacks are designed to extract revenue rather than to directly disrupt chain liveness. We present PDoS, a hybrid attack that combines block header signal deterrence with parasitic revenue extraction. PDoS disrupts blockchain liveness while exploiting the victim pool's share-reward mechanism to subsidize the attack cost, thereby lowering the adversarial hash-power threshold required to induce rational miners to shut down. We further show a counterintuitive result: in high-fee or high-MEV environments, higher block value can make PoW systems less secure by increasing the attacker's parasitic revenue and pushing the attack across the break-even point into a self-sustaining, or even profitable, regime. To the best of our knowledge, PDoS is the first attack to demonstrate that disrupting PoW blockchain liveness can be economically self-sustaining and even profitable.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12450