Assessing Security of Cryptocurrencies with Attack-Defense Trees: Proof of Concept and Future Directions

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have been one of the new major technologies of the last decade. In this paper, we assess the security of Bitcoin using attack-defense trees, an established formalism to evaluate the security of systems. In this paper, our main contributions are as follows: (1) We provide an extended attack-defense tree model for attacks on Bitcoin. (2) We demonstrate the general usability of existing analysis methods for attack-defense trees in this context. (3) We highlight further research directions necessary to extend attack-defense trees to a full-fledged overarching model for security assessment.