Assessing Security of Cryptocurrencies with Attack-Defense Trees: Proof of Concept and Future Directions

• Published in: Theoretical Aspects of Computing - ICTAC 2021 Vol. 12819; pp. 214 - 234
• Main Authors: Eisentraut, Julia, Holzer, Stephan, Klioba, Katharina, Křetínský, Jan, Pin, Lukas, Wagner, Alexander
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2021; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• ISBN: 3030853144; 9783030853143
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-85315-0_13

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have been one of the new major technologies of the last decade. In this paper, we assess the security of Bitcoin using attack-defense trees, an established formalism to evaluate the security of systems. In this paper, our main contributions are as follows: (1) We provide an extended attack-defense tree model for attacks on Bitcoin. (2) We demonstrate the general usability of existing analysis methods for attack-defense trees in this context. (3) We highlight further research directions necessary to extend attack-defense trees to a full-fledged overarching model for security assessment.