# A Tractable Probabilistic Approach to Analyze Sybil Attacks in Sharding-Based Blockchain Protocols

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.07215 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07215/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Blockchain-empowered Federated Learning: Benefits, Challenges, and Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00873/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer from scalability issues. Sharding is one of the most promising and leading solutions to scale blockchain. The basic idea behind sharding is to divide the blockchain network into multiple committees, where each processing a separate set of transactions, rather than the entire network processes all transactions. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic approach to analyze the security of sharding-based blockchain protocols. Based on this approach, we investigate the threat of Sybil attacks in these protocols. The key contribution of our paper is a tractable probabilistic approach to accurately compute the failure probability that at least one committee fails and ultimately compute the probability of a successful attack. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a numerical and comparative analysis of the proposed approach with existing approaches.