Introduction

CPR provides tools for specifying, simulating, and attacking proof-of-work consensus protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Work in Progress #

The whole website is under construction. There’s not much information for newcomers yet. At some point I want to provide tutorials the following use-cases.

• Evaluate specified protocols in a virtual environment.
• Evaluate supported attacks in a virtual environment.
• Search attacks against specified protocols using reinforcement learning.
• Specification of protocols.
• Specification of attack spaces.

If you want to start now, don’t hesitate to contact me for support.

Overview #

CPR’s core component is a network simulation engine for proof-of-work protocols. The engine takes a protocol specification and a network topology as input, then simulates the execution of the protocol in the network over time. Additional tooling enables automated search for attack strategies with reinforcement learning.

I’m working on a detailed documentation such that my tooling becomes useful for others. So far, I’ve documented most parts of the core simulation engine, most of the specified protocols, and some useful network topologies.

The virtual enviroment page informally describes CPR’s approach to network simulation. The protocol specification page describes how we specify protocols. The simulator page describes how the simulator executes the specified protocols in a virtual network. Read these pages in order, to learn about the inner workings of CPR. Then, continue exploring the different proof-of-work consensus protocols.

Python/RL Quickstart #

CPR provides an OpenAI Gym environment for attack search with Python RL frameworks. You can install it PyPI, if you meet the following requirements.

• Unix-like operating system with x86_64 support. I’ve tested Linux (Fedora and Ubuntu) and Mac OSX.
• CPython, version >= 3.9
• pip package installer for Python.

In a terminal, run pip install cpr-gym. Then, you are ready to run the following Python snippet which simulates 2016 steps (mined or received blocks) of honest behaviour in Nakamoto consensus.

import gym
import cpr_gym

env = gym.make("cpr-nakamoto-v0", episode_len=2016)
obs = env.reset()
done = False
while not done:
    action = env.policy(obs, "honest")
    obs, rew, done, info = env.step(action)

Until I catch up with the documentation, consider reading our tests to find out how to attack the other protocols and how to set important parameters like the attacker capabilities alpha and gamma.

If the PyPI package does not work for you, consult the GitHub project for instructions on building the project from source.