Michael Mirkin

dblp:244/9573 · DBLP profile ↗
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2ranked-venue papers
2as first author
1since 2021 · last 2024
—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Security and privacy · 2 · 2 first-author · 1 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Network and information security
2 papers
Blockchain and cryptocurrency security · 78% Network security · 22%
Computer architecture, parallel and distributed computing, and storage systems
1 paper
Distributed systems · 50% Embedded and real-time systems · 50%
Theoretical computer science
1 paper
Algorithmic game theory and mechanism design · 100%

Topics — the 6 heaviest of 6, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Blockchain and cryptocurrency security
consensus protocol
0.812024
Sprints: Intermittent Blockchain PoW Mining · USENIX Security Symposium 2024
Blockchain and cryptocurrency security › consensus protocol
proof-of-work
0.812024
Sprints: Intermittent Blockchain PoW Mining · USENIX Security Symposium 2024
Network security › attack strategy
denial-of-service attack
0.412020
BDoS: Blockchain Denial-of-Service · CCS 2020
Distributed systems
consensus
0.212024
Sprints: Intermittent Blockchain PoW Mining · USENIX Security Symposium 2024
Embedded and real-time systems
intermittent computing
0.212024
Sprints: Intermittent Blockchain PoW Mining · USENIX Security Symposium 2024
Algorithmic game theory and mechanism design
incentive mechanism
0.112020
BDoS: Blockchain Denial-of-Service · CCS 2020

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

proof-of-work mining · 1.5intermittent execution · 1.5game-theoretic analysis · 0.9
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2024 Sprints: Intermittent Blockchain PoW Mining
Michael Mirkin, Lulu Zhou, Ittay Eyal, Fan Zhang 0022
USENIX Security Symposium1
2020 BDoS: Blockchain Denial-of-Service
abstract
Proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin secure vast amounts of money. Their operators, called miners, expend resources to generate blocks and receive monetary rewards for their effort. Blockchains are, in principle, attractive targets for Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks: There is fierce competition among coins, as well as potential gains from short selling. Classical DoS attacks, however, typically target a few servers and cannot scale to systems with many nodes. There have been no successful DoS attacks to date against prominent cryptocurrencies. We present Blockchain DoS (BDoS), the first incentive-based DoS attack that targets PoW cryptocurrencies. Unlike classical DoS, BDoS targets the system's mechanism design: It exploits the reward mechanism to discourage miner participation. Previous DoS attacks against PoW blockchains require an adversary's mining power to match that of all other miners. In contrast, BDoS can cause a blockchain to grind to a halt with significantly fewer resources, e.g., 21% as of March 2020 in Bitcoin, according to our empirical study. We find that Bitcoin's vulnerability to BDoS increases rapidly as the mining industry matures and profitability drops. BDoS differs from known attacks like Selfish Mining in its aim not to increase an adversary's revenue, but to disrupt the system. Although it bears some algorithmic similarity to those attacks, it introduces a new adversarial model, goals, algorithm, and game-theoretic analysis. Beyond its direct implications for operational blockchains, BDoS introduces the novel idea that an adversary can manipulate miners' incentives by proving the existence of blocks without actually publishing them.
Michael Mirkin, Yan Ji 0001, Jonathan Pang, Ariah Klages-Mundt, Ittay Eyal, Ari Juels
CCS1