Bachelor/Master Thesis
Security of the Phantom Blockchain Protocol
Blockchain protocols consist of a chain of blocks each of them with some transactions (buying a coffee for example). Miners produce these blocks and broadcast them to the network, unfortunately if the network is slow instead of a block following another block we can have two blocks following one single block. We need to agree in one of these blocks, in other words, we will discard one of these blocks (this phenomenon is known as fork). To solve this inconvenience DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) protocols were created as a possible successor of the usual blockchain protocols.
One of these DAG protocols is PHANTOM [1], where studying some properties of the connections between the blocks we can make an ordering the blocks and use it as a blockchain protocol. However, this ordering can introduce some vulnerabilities. This project consists on a practical implementation of the theoretical attack to the ordering protocol of PHANTOM described in Conflux paper [2]. Some alternative ordering protocols can also be considered to improve PHANTOM protocol.
[1] PHANTOM, GHOSTDAG: Two Scalable BlockDAG protocols
[2] Scaling Nakamoto Consensus to Thousands of Transactions per Second (Conflux)