Availability analysis of a permissioned blockchain with a lightweight consensus protocol

This paper offers a novel approach to the evaluation of provenance blockchain security and reliability using analytical methods for assessing system availability against malicious miner DoS attacks. In particular, we present the reliability and availability analysis of the LightWeight Mining (LWM) protocol for securing data provenance. Our analysis shows the reliability of the protocol and its ability to protect against malicious miner DoS attacks. We use digital signatures to prove integrity and non-repudiation of messages passing the system. We describe system behaviors using communicating sequential processes (CSP) to check for synchronization within a number of concurrent processes. Queuing theory is used to determine the average waiting time for client blockchain transactions when malicious miners work to slow the system. CSP and queuing theory jointly test the blockchain's ability to make progress despite the presence of malicious miners. Further, the methodology described can be extended to other blockchain applications. Additional threats, beyond the malicious miner DoS attack, are reserved for future work.