Secure Blockchain Network Communication using SCION

Sammanfattning: The paper by Apostolaki, Zohar, and Vanbever [3] describes two routing attacks on the Bitcoin network, partition attack and delay attack. By isolating parts of the network or delaying block propagation, a significant amount of mining power could be wasted, resulting in revenue loss and a wide range of exploits could be enabled, such as double spending. Hence, the Bitcoin’s solution to the double spending problem would be broken, making the technology unreliable and unavailable. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the standardized routing protocol in the current Internet, without any security guarantees. Numerous security extensions have been proposed for BGP, but there is still no widely deployed solution. Therefore, some argue that instead of securing BGP, an entirely new inter-domain architecture should be developed. The thesis investigates the possible mitigation of routing attacks in the blockchain technology, by using the new inter-domain architecture called SCION. Two solutions are proposed utilizing SCION and IP, namely an application level solution and a SIG proxy solution. The solutions have been evaluated in terms of security, availability and efficiency, with the conclusion that routing attacks can be mitigated using SCION. Hence, providing incentive to the blockchain users to use SCION, in order to benefit from a secure and highly available blockchain network communication, with potential revenue increase. Furthermore, the thesis provides incentive for further development of the SCION architecture, as well as applying SCION to additional fields.