Received September 11, 2019, accepted September 28, 2019, date of publication October 4, 2019, date of current version October 16, 2019. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2945600 Mining Pool Manipulation in Blockchain Network Over Evolutionary Block Withholding Attack SEONGGEUN KIM , (Student Member, IEEE), AND SANG-GEUN HAHN, (Member, IEEE) Department of Mathematical Sciences, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 34141, South Korea Corresponding author: Seonggeun Kim (
[email protected]) This work was supported by the Information and Communication Technology Promotion (IITP) Grant Funded by the Korean Government (MSIT) (The mathematical structure of functional encryption and its analysis) under Grant 2016-6-00598. ABSTRACT In the current blockchain network, many participants rationally migrate the pool to receive a better compensation according to their contribution in situations where the pools they engage encounter undesirable attacks. The Nash equilibria of attacked pool has been widely analyzed, but the analysis of practical methodology for obtaining it is still inadequate. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary game theoretic analysis of Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchain network in order to investigate the mining pool dynamics affected by malicious infiltrators and the feasibility of autonomous migration among individual miners. We formulate a revenue model for mining pools which are implicitly allowed to launch a block withholding attack. Under our mining game, we analyze the evolutionary stability of Nash equilibrium with replicator dynamics, which can explain the population change with time between participated pools. Further, we explore the statistical approximation of successful mining events to show the necessity of artificial manipulation for migrating.