A Simulation-Based Framework for Mitigating a 51% Attack on Blockchain Networks

Project Domain / Category

Blockchain

Abstract / Introduction

The Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism, fundamental to blockchains like Bitcoin, is vulnerable to a "51% attack" where a malicious miner with majority computational power can manipulate the blockchain.

This project implements a proactive defense algorithm named "Safe Mode Detection" to counter this threat. The core idea is to modify the consensus rules to impose a hard limit on consecutive blocks a single miner can produce and to implement a Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) based comparison mechanism to detect fraudulent chains attempting double-spending utilizing a 51% attack.

Functional Requirements:

        Implement a blockchain to configure a malicious miner capable of initiating a 51% attack by building a private chain.

        Implement the "Long Private Chain (LPC)" defense: The system must automatically reject any new block that would create a sequence of six or more consecutive blocks from the same miner on the honest chain.

        Develop a comprehensive simulation framework to run multiple scenarios: an attack under standard consensus rules, and an attack under the modified consensus rules.

        Generate and present results analyzing the success rate of attacks, the structure of the final

blockchain, and the computational performance of the proposed solution.

Tools:

        Programming Language: Python 3.x

        Simulator: BlockSim (Open-source Python-based blockchain simulator) or any other simulator to simulate Blockchain

        Development Environment: IDE (PyCharm), Jupyter Notebook for analysis

        Libraries: Matplotlib, Seaborn, Pandas for data visualization and analysis

Supervisor:

Name: Fouzia Jumani

Email ID: fouziajumani@vu.edu.pk

MS Teams ID: fouziajumani@outlook.com