avalanche_playground

A structural (non-cryptographic) Python implementation of the avalanche algorithm by Team Rocket.

Papers like this rely on structural primitives and incentives within the network to actually remain secure/stable. This repo boils down the important bits into Python so you can play with/attack/validate the algorithm.

I thought it'd be nice to add a visual to aide in exploration. Uses curses and networkx.

Usage

python simulator.py

You can see a clip of it here: https://gfycat.com/GargantuanMadEkaltadeta

Paper

Get the paper here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/150uOd161WUzmcypoGUPfW3PrzE9lc_Eo/view

Notes

• The "run" function is just the body of the avalanche while loop. You can see my usage in the code, which is basically to call it a number of times between transaction submissions. I meant this to be useful as it gives fine grained control for testing asynchronous attacks.
• I believe the paper has a bug on figure 6 line 6 that I fix in this implementation (you need to check for the preferred transaction in the conflict set, not just the count).
• Asynchronous execution is not analyzed in the paper nor described in the implementation so I added a simple deferment mechanism that only tries to add the transaction once the parents are already added.

TODO

clean things up, although the API should be pretty self evident