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
From the original article
1 min read at arxiv.orgThe 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.
By Junjie Hu · arxiv.org
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