SM-SIM: A Simulator for Analyzing Selfish Mining Attacks in Blockchain Systems

Selfish mining attacks threaten the tamper-resistance of blockchain systems with consensus mechanisms based on proof-of-work and probabilistic finality. Optimizing blockchain system configurations can mitigate these attacks. This, however, requires software architects to thoroughly understand the influence of such configurations on the success probability of selfish mining attacks. This work presents SM-SIM, a discrete event simulator to analyze blockchain system configurations and estimate the success probability of selfish mining attacks. SM-SIM includes a meta-model for representing blockchain system configurations and a simulation model for mimicking blockchain operations and attacks. We demonstrate the plausibility and utility of SM-SIM by conducting experiments with different configurations, such as network topologies, block size, latencies, and number of attackers. SM-SIM enables more flexible, architecture-focused analyses and optimization of blockchain system configurations, reducing their vulnerability to selfish mining attacks.