A Tree-Mapped Taxonomy of Blockchain Attacks

Blockchains provide decentralized data storage and have gained popularity over the past decade. Their popularity has led to a multitude of attacks in research and practice. We analyzed the available literature and found 147 distinct blockchain attacks. We examined these blockchain attack vectors relative to existing blockchain attack taxonomies and found that current taxonomies miss one-third (33.33%) of attack types. We found that blockchain attacks are evolving faster than we can classify them according to conventional taxonomies. To address this, we provide a novel taxonomy of blockchain attacks using a treemap visualization. We believe this taxonomy will help the community understand the context for new attack discoveries and could help researchers better forecast opportunities for future work in blockchain security.