A Fair Consensus Protocol for Transaction Ordering

Asayag, Avi; Cohen, Gad; Grayevsky, Ido; Leshkowitz, Maya; Rottenstreich, Ori; Tamari, Ronen; Yakira, David

doi:10.1109/icnp.2018.00016

Cited by 28 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Miller et al [69] and Asyag et al [70] introduce encrypted Byzantine consensus protocols relying on threshold signatures [71]- [73]. In an (l, n) threshold signature scheme, a single public key is used to encrypt messages, and l out of n committee member signatures combine to decrypt the message.…”

Section: G Off-chain Commit and Revealmentioning

confidence: 99%

SoK: Preventing Transaction Reordering Manipulations in Decentralized Finance

Heimbach,

Wattenhofer

2022

Preprint

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User transactions on Ethereum's peer-to-peer network are at risk of being attacked. The smart contracts building decentralized finance (DeFi) have introduced a new transaction ordering dependency to the Ethereum blockchain. As a result, attackers can profit from front-and back-running transactions. Multiple approaches to mitigate transaction reordering manipulations have surfaced recently. However, the success of individual approaches in mitigating such attacks and their impact on the entire blockchain remains largely unstudied.In this systematization of knowledge (SoK), we categorize and analyze state-of-the-art transaction reordering manipulation mitigation schemes. Instead of restricting our analysis to a scheme's success at preventing transaction reordering attacks, we evaluate its full impact on the blockchain. Therefore, we are able to provide a complete picture of the strengths and weaknesses of current mitigation schemes. We find that currently no scheme fully meets all the demands of the blockchain ecosystem. In fact, all approaches demonstrate unsatisfactory performance in at least one area relevant to the blockchain ecosystem.

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Section: G Off-chain Commit and Revealmentioning

confidence: 99%

SoK: Preventing Transaction Reordering Manipulations in Decentralized Finance

Heimbach,

Wattenhofer

2022

Preprint

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“…A few recent papers proposed solutions to enforce that transaction ordering follows a certain norm, mostly based on statistical tests of potential deviations [3,42,52]. These work were, however, mostly of theoretical nature in that they did not contain empirical evidence of deviation by miners, but rather assumed that miners might deviate.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This model of operation results in different miners potentially having distinct, typically different, views of the state of the system (e.g., set of outstanding transactions). Given these differences, are there mechanisms (say, based on statistical tests [3,42,52]) that any third-party observer could use to verify that a miner adheres to the established norm(s)?…”

Section: The Case For Chain Neutralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Selfish & opaque transaction ordering in the Bitcoin blockchain

Messias

Alzayat

Chandrasekaran

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference

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Most public blockchain protocols, including the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, do not formally specify the order in which miners should select transactions from the pool of pending (or uncommitted) transactions for inclusion in the blockchain. Over the years, informal conventions or "norms" for transaction ordering have, however, emerged via the use of shared software by miners, e.g., the GetBlockTemplate (GBT) mining protocol in Bitcoin Core. Today, a widely held view is that Bitcoin miners prioritize transactions based on their offered "transaction fee-per-byte. " Bitcoin users are, consequently, encouraged to increase the fees to accelerate the commitment of their transactions, particularly during periods of congestion. In this paper, we audit the Bitcoin blockchain and present statistically significant evidence of mining pools deviating from the norms to accelerate the commitment of transactions for which they have (i) a selfish or vested interest, or (ii) received dark-fee payments via opaque (non-public) side-channels. As blockchains are increasingly being used as a record-keeping substrate for a variety of decentralized (financial technology) systems, our findings call for an urgent discussion on defining neutrality norms that miners must adhere to when ordering transactions in the chains. Finally, we make our data sets and scripts publicly available. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy; Economics of security and privacy.

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“…Hence, their contents become known only after the message order has been decided. For instance, the Helix protocol [2] implements this approach and additionally exploits in-protocol randomness for two additional goals: to elect the processes running the protocol from a larger group and to determine which messages among all available ones must be included by a process when proposing a block. This method provides resistance to censorship but still permits some order-manipulation attacks.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quick Order Fairness

Cachin¹,

Jovana²,

Steinhauer³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Leader-based protocols for consensus, i.e., atomic broadcast, allow some processes to unilaterally affect the final order of transactions. This has become a problem for blockchain networks and decentralized finance because it facilitates front-running and other attacks. To address this, order fairness for payload messages has been introduced recently as a new safety property for atomic broadcast complementing traditional agreement and liveness. We relate order fairness to the standard validity notions for consensus protocols and highlight some limitations with the existing formalization. Based on this, we introduce a new differential order-fairness property that fixes these issues. We also present the quick order-fair atomic broadcast protocol that guarantees payload message delivery in a differentially fair order and is much more efficient than existing order-fair consensus protocols. It works for asynchronous and for eventually synchronous networks with optimal resilience, tolerating corruptions of up to one third of the processes. Previous solutions required there to be less than one fourth of faults. Furthermore, our protocol incurs only quadratic cost, in terms of amortized message complexity per delivered payload.

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A Fair Consensus Protocol for Transaction Ordering

Cited by 28 publications

References 8 publications

SoK: Preventing Transaction Reordering Manipulations in Decentralized Finance

SoK: Preventing Transaction Reordering Manipulations in Decentralized Finance

Selfish & opaque transaction ordering in the Bitcoin blockchain

Quick Order Fairness

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