Temporary Power Adjusting Withholding Attack

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 15 Apr 2026] Temporary Power Adjusting Withholding Attack Mustafa Doger, Sennur Ulukus We consider the block withholding attacks on pools, more specifically the state-of-the-art Power Adjusting Withholding (PAW) attack. We propose a generalization called Temporary PAW (T-PAW) where the adversary withholds a fPoW from pool mining at most T-time even when no other block is mined. We show that PAW attack corresponds to T\to\infty and is not optimal. In fact, the extra reward of T-PAW compared to PAW improves by an unbounded factor as adversarial hash fraction \alpha, pool size \beta and adversarial network influence \gamma decreases. For example, the extra reward of T-PAW is 22 times that of PAW when an adversary targets a pool with (\alpha,\beta,\gamma)=(0.05,0.05,0). We show that honest mining is sub-optimal to T-PAW even when there is no difficulty adjustment and the adversarial revenue increase is non-trivial, e.g., for most (\alpha,\beta) at least 1\% within 2 weeks in Bitcoin even when \gamma=0 (for PAW it was at most 0.01\%). Hence, T-PAW exposes a significant structural weakness in pooled mining-its primary participants, small miners, are not only contributors but can easily turn into potential adversaries with immediate non-trivial benefits. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Information Theory (cs.IT); Probability (math.PR) Cite as: arXiv:2604.14135 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.14135v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.14135 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Mustafa Doger [view email] [v1] Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:55:56 UTC (1,028 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.DC cs.IT math math.IT math.PR References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)