Simulation study on the security of consensus algorithms in DAG-based distributed ledger

Abstract

Due to the advantages of high volume of transactions and low resource consumption, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has been considered a possible next-generation alternative to block-chain. However, the security of the DAG-based system has yet to be comprehensively understood. Aiming at verifying and evaluating the security of DAG-based DLT, we develop a Multi-Agent based IOTA Simulation platform called MAIOTASim. In MAIOTASim, we model honest and malicious nodes and simulate the configurable network environment, including network topology and delay. The double-spending attack is a particular security issue related to DLT. We perform the security verification of the consensus algorithms under multiple double-spending attack strategies. Our simulations show that the consensus algorithms can resist the parasite chain attack and partially resist the splitting attack, but they are ineffective under the large weight attack. We take the cumulative weight difference of transactions as the evaluation criterion and analyze the effect of different consensus algorithms with parameters under each attack strategy. Besides, MAIOTASim enables users to perform large-scale simulations with multiple nodes and tens of thousands of transactions more efficiently than state-of-the-art ones.