Lightweight blockchain approach to reduce double-spend and 51% attacks on Proof-of-Work

Abstract

Blockchain has attracted tremendous attention in recent years due to its significant features including anonymity, security, immutability, and audibility. Blockchain technology has been used in several nonmonetary applications, including Internet-of-Things. Though blockchain has limited resources, and scalability is computationally expensive, resulting in delays and large bandwidth overhead that are unsuitable for many IoT devices. In this paper, we work on a lightweight blockchain approach that is suited for IoT needs and provides end-to-end security. Decentralization is achieved in our lightweight blockchain implementation by building a network with a lot of high-resource devices collaborate to maintain the blockchain. The nodes in the network is arranged in sorted order w.r.t execution time and count to reduce the mining overheads and is accountable for handling the public blockchain. We propose a distributed execution time-based consensus algorithm that decreases the delay and overhead of the mining process. We also propose a randomized node-selection algorithm for the selection of nodes to verify the mined blocks to eliminate the double-spend and 51% attack. The results are encouraging and significantly reduce the mining overhead and keep a check on the double-spending problem and 51% attack.