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Selfish mining attack in blockchain: a systematic literature review

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Abstract

Selfish mining is a sneaky way that some people cheat in blockchain networks or distributed digital ledger systems. They do it by mining a block in secret and keeping it hidden. Then, when the secret chain of these miners’ are longer than the real one, they show it to everyone, and the blockchain system selects the longest chain as the valid chain. This leads to the network adopting the longest chain as the valid one, resulting in the effort put into mining by other miners becoming futile. By doing this, selfish miners in the blockchain network have a high potential to get more rewards. This behavior goes against the rules of blockchain networks, where everyone is supposed to play by the same rules and have an equal chance of getting rewards. This prejudiced action of selfish miners have motivated us to investigate systematically the existing methods that are being used to address the selfish mining attacks. Therefore, we conducted a SLR (systematic literature review) of 29 papers using the Kitchenham methodology and put that into PRISMA framework. This study aims to investigate methods for detecting and mitigating selfish mining attacks, their limitations, and future directions.

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Notes

  1. SARSA - State-Action-Reward-State-Action.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Ruhuna, Matara, Sri Lanka

    Nadisha Madhushanie & Sugandima Vidanagamachchi

  2. School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Nalin Arachchilage

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  1. Nadisha Madhushanie
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Nadisha Madhushanie - Review paper writingSugandima Vidanagamachchi - Supervision and Editing the paperNalin Arachchilage - Supervision and Editing the paperAll authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Nadisha Madhushanie.

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Madhushanie, N., Vidanagamachchi, S. & Arachchilage, N. Selfish mining attack in blockchain: a systematic literature review. Int. J. Inf. Secur. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-024-00849-5

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