Incentive compatible and provably secure blockchain applications

With the introduction and advent of blockchain technologies, money transfers have become easier with lower costs, no matter how far the recipient is from the sender. Moreover, the blockchain technology has not only affected the contemporary economical model, but also inspired many novel applications that have been thought impossible without the help of a trusted third party (such as governments or well-recognized companies). However, being a newly developed technology, blockchain still lacks enough research to ensure its security (in terms of mining, transactions, or its applications) and incentive compatibility (i.e., the participants are motivated for following the expected protocol steps). Cryptography and game theory are two well-known tools with traditional proving methods to help us for this task. In this thesis, we utilize game theory and cryptography based security models for building secure applications on blockchain. First, we develop a provably secure blockchain application that we name as e-donation, for secure, fair and decentralized online donations. Second, we develop a practical attribute based digital signature scheme. Third, we analyze and improve the security of blockchain by providing an incentive compatible defense solution against the selfish mining attack of Eyal and Sirer (CACM '18) on proof-of-work blockchain. Forth, we develop a network-based simulation tool for both attacks and defenses. Fifth, we propose a framework for better game-theoretical analysis of multi-player mechanisms when the sizes of the coalitions can be bounded by a threshold, via successfully combining threshold security ideas of cryptography and transferable utility of game theory. Sixth, we apply our threshold coalition notions to show the incentive compatibility of our solution to the outsourced incentivized computation problem in blockchain with multiple outsourced parties.