Delayed packing attack and countermeasure against transaction information based applications

Due to the nature of decentralization, blockchain-based applications are gradually adopted by more and more systems in different fields to replace centralized third-party agencies. Many applications, like blockchain oracles, rely on on-chain transactions to deliver information that is used to make final decisions. There have been many methods proposed to guarantee the correctness of the final results, and most of them are in terms of the management of information providers and the application's design. However, to our notice, only a few works have discussed the security threat caused by rational mining pools that are responsible for packing transactions and information into blocks and uploading them to the blockchain. Therefore in this paper, we propose a possible delayed packing attack carried out by rational mining pools against these transaction information based applications. Game theory analysis is conducted to obtain the Nash equilibrium strategy, and the price of anarchy is calculated to depict the success probability of such an attack under different circumstances. In addition, we design a countermeasure protocol based on cryptography tools to defend against the delayed packing attack. Finally, we carry out a thorough security analysis as well as corresponding experiments to prove the security and feasibility of our countermeasure.