Skip to main content

The Game Among Bribers in a Smart Contract System

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10958))

Abstract

Blockchain has been used to build various applications, and the introduction of smart contracts further extends its impacts. Most of existing works consider the positive usage of smart contracts but ignore the other side of it: smart contracts can be used in a destructive way, particularly, they can be utilized to carry out bribery. The hardness of tracing a briber in a blockchain system may even motivate bribers. Furthermore, an adversary can utilize bribery smart contracts to influence the execution results of other smart contracts in the same system. To better understand this threat, we propose a formal framework to analyze bribery in the smart contract system using game theory. We give a full characterization on how the bribery budget of a briber may influence the execution of a smart contract if the briber tries to manipulate its execution result by bribing users in the system.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Bredereck, R., Chen, J., Faliszewski, P., Nichterlein, A., Niedermeier, R.: Prices matter for the parameterized complexity of shift bribery. Inf. Comput. 251, 140–164 (2016)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  2. Bredereck, R., Faliszewski, P., Niedermeier, R., Talmon, N.: Complexity of shift bribery in committee elections. In: AAAI, pp. 2452–2458 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bredereck, R., Faliszewski, P., Niedermeier, R., Talmon, N.: Large-scale election campaigns: combinatorial shift bribery. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 55, 603–652 (2016)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  4. Buterin, V.: A next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform. white paper (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Chen, L., Xu, L., Gao, Z., Shah, N., Lu, Y., Shi, W.: Smart contract execution-the (+-)-biased ballot problem. In: LIPIcs-Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics. vol. 92. Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Chen, L., Xu, L., Shah, N., Gao, Z., Lu, Y., Shi, W.: Decentralized execution of smart contracts: agent model perspective and its implications. In: Brenner, M., et al. (eds.) FC 2017. LNCS, vol. 10323, pp. 468–477. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70278-0_29

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  7. Chen, L., et al.: Protecting election from bribery: new approach and computational complexity characterization (extended abstract). In: Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, vol. 1. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Dey, P., Misra, N., Narahari, Y.: Frugal bribery in voting. In: Proceedings of the Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 2466–2472. AAAI Press (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Dorn, B., Krüger, D.: On the hardness of bribery variants in voting with CP-nets. Ann. Math. Artif. Intell. 77(3–4), 251–279 (2016)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  10. Dorn, B., Krüger, D., Scharpfenecker, P.: Often harder than in the constructive case: destructive bribery in CP-nets. In: Markakis, E., Schäfer, G. (eds.) WINE 2015. LNCS, vol. 9470, pp. 314–327. Springer, Heidelberg (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48995-6_23

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Elkind, E., Faliszewski, P., Slinko, A.: Swap bribery. In: Mavronicolas, M., Papadopoulou, V.G. (eds.) SAGT 2009. LNCS, vol. 5814, pp. 299–310. Springer, Heidelberg (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04645-2_27

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  12. Erdélyi, G., Reger, C., Yang, Y.: The complexity of bribery and control in group identification. In: Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, pp. 1142–1150. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Eyal, I., Sirer, E.G.: Majority is not enough: bitcoin mining is vulnerable. In: Christin, N., Safavi-Naini, R. (eds.) FC 2014. LNCS, vol. 8437, pp. 436–454. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45472-5_28

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Faliszewski, P.: Nonuniform bribery. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, vol. 3, pp. 1569–1572. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Faliszewski, P., Hemaspaandra, E., Hemaspaandra, L.A.: How hard is bribery in elections? J. Artif. Intell. Res. 35, 485–532 (2009)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  16. Faliszewski, P., Hemaspaandra, E., Hemaspaandra, L.A., Rothe, J.: Llull and copeland voting computationally resist bribery and constructive control. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 35, 275–341 (2009)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  17. Faliszewski, P., Rothe, J.: Control and Bribery in Voting. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2016)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  18. Kaczmarczyk, A., Faliszewski, P.: Algorithms for destructive shift bribery. In: Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems, pp. 305–313. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Knop, D., Kouteckỳ, M., Mnich, M.: Voting and bribing in single-exponential time. In: LIPIcs-Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, vol. 66. Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Kothapalli, A., Cordi, C.: A bribery framework using smartcontracts (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Lewenberg, Y., Bachrach, Y., Sompolinsky, Y., Zohar, A., Rosenschein, J.S.: Bitcoin mining pools: a cooperative game theoretic analysis. In: Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 919–927. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Luu, L., Chu, D.H., Olickel, H., Saxena, P., Hobor, A.: Making smart contracts smarter. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 254–269. ACM (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Mattei, N., Pini, M.S., Venable, K.B., Rossi, F.: Bribery in voting over combinatorial domains is easy. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, vol. 3, pp. 1407–1408. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Osborne, M.J., Rubinstein, A.: A Course in Game Theory. MIT Press, Cambridge (1994)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  26. Pini, M.S., Rossi, F., Venable, K.B.: Bribery in voting with soft constraints. In: AAAI (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Sapirshtein, A., Sompolinsky, Y., Zohar, A.: Optimal selfish mining strategies in bitcoin. arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.06183 (2015)

  28. Szabo, N.: Formalizing and securing relationships on public networks. First Monday 2(9) (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Vazirani, V.V.: Approximation Algorithms. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04565-7

    Book  Google Scholar 

  30. Vukolić, M.: The quest for scalable blockchain fabric: proof-of-work vs. BFT replication. In: Camenisch, J., Kesdoğan, D. (eds.) iNetSec 2015. LNCS, vol. 9591, pp. 112–125. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39028-4_9

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  31. Xu, L., Chen, L., Gao, Z., Lu, Y., Shi, W.: CoC: secure supply chain management system based on public ledger. In: 2017 26th International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN), pp. 1–6. IEEE (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Xu, L., Chen, L., Shah, N., Gao, Z., Lu, Y., Shi, W.: DL-BAC: distributed ledger based access control for web applications. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, pp. 1445–1450. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Xu, L., et al.: Enabling the sharing economy: privacy respecting contract based on public blockchain. In: Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies and Contracts, pp. 15–21. ACM (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Yang, Y., Shrestha, Y.R., Guo, J.: How hard is bribery in party based elections? In: Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 1725–1726. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Yang, Y., Shrestha, Y.R., Guo, J.: How hard is bribery with distance restrictions? In: ECAI, pp. 363–371 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  36. Yin, Y., Vorobeychik, Y., An, B., Hazon, N.: Optimally protecting elections. In: IJCAI, pp. 538–545 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Lin Chen , Lei Xu , Zhimin Gao , Nolan Shah , Ton Chanh Le , Yang Lu or Weidong Shi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 International Financial Cryptography Association

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Chen, L. et al. (2019). The Game Among Bribers in a Smart Contract System. In: Zohar, A., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10958. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_20

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_20

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-58819-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-58820-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics