2025/07/02 by Michelle Yeo, Haoqian Zhang, Yeo, Michelle +1
Computer Science · #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Cryptography and Data Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Distributed #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing #Parallel #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2507.01453
openalex publication_date 2025/07/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Censorship resilience is a fundamental assumption underlying the security of blockchain protocols. Additionally, the analysis of blockchain security from an economic and game theoretic perspective has been growing in popularity in recent years. In this work, we present a surprising rational censorship attack on blockchain censorship resilience when we adopt the analysis of blockchain security from a game theoretic lens and assume all users are rational. In our attack, a colluding group with sufficient voting power censors the remainder nodes such that the group alone can gain all the rewards from maintaining the blockchain. We show that if nodes are rational, coordinating this attack just requires a public read and write blackboard and we formally model the attack using a game theoretic framework. Furthermore, we note that to ensure the success of the attack, nodes need to know the total true voting power held by the colluding group. We prove that the strategy to join the rational censorship attack and also for nodes to honestly declare their power is a subgame perfect equilibrium in the corresponding extensive form game induced by our attack. Finally, we discuss the implications of the attack on blockchain users and protocol designers as well as some potential countermeasures.