Adding Fairness to Order: Preventing Front-Running Attacks in BFT Protocols using TEEs

Stathakopoulou, Chrysoula; Rüsch, Signe; Brandenburger, Marcus; Vukolić, Marko

doi:10.1109/srds53918.2021.00013

Cited by 18 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…The second method [56] is to use commit-reveal schemes to make miners' behaviours accountable. The third way [57] leverages the hardware-assisted trusted execution environment to ensure the integrity of program execution. These methods add input causality to the ordering process, improving the cost of behaving profit from miners.…”

Section: Countermeasuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Unfairness on Proof of Authority: Order Manipulation Attacks and Remedies

Wang¹,

Li²,

Wang³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Proof of Authority (PoA) is a type of permissioned consensus algorithm with a fixed committee. PoA has been widely adopted by communities and industries due to its better performance and faster finality. In this paper, we explore the unfairness issue existing in the current PoA implementations. We have investigated 2,500+ in the wild projects and selected 10+ as our main focus (covering Ethereum, Binance smart chain, etc.). We have identified two types of order manipulation attacks to separately break the transaction-level (a.k.a. transaction ordering) and the block-level (sealer position ordering) fairness. Both of them merely rely on honest-but-profitable sealer assumption without modifying original settings. We launch these attacks on the forked branches under an isolated environment and carefully evaluate the attacking scope towards different implementations. To date (as of Nov 2021), the potentially affected PoA market cap can reach up to 681, 087 million USD. Besides, we further dive into the source code of selected projects, and accordingly, propose our recommendation for the fix. To the best of knowledge, this work provides the first exploration of the unfairness issue in PoA algorithms.

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Section: Countermeasuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Unfairness on Proof of Authority: Order Manipulation Attacks and Remedies

Wang¹,

Li²,

Wang³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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show abstract

“…Order-fairness is defined as: "if a large number of replicas receives a transaction 1 before another transaction 2 , then 1 should be ordered before 2 " [135]. Order fairness has been partially addressed using different techniques: (1) monitoring the leader to ensure it does not initiate two new requests of a client before initiating an old request of another client in Aardvark [81], (2) adding a preordering phase in Prime [22] where replicas order the received requests locally and share their own ordering with each other, (3) encrypting transactions and revealing the contents only once their ordering is fixed [34,66,176,215], (4) reputation-based systems [34,93,141,158] to detect unfair censorship, and (5) providing opportunities for every replica to propose and commit its transactions using fair leader election or fair committee election [8,34,113,136,158,191,227].…”

Section: Quality Of Servicementioning

confidence: 99%

The Bedrock of Byzantine Fault Tolerance: A Unified Platform for BFT Protocol Design and Implementation

Amiri¹,

Wu²,

Agrawal³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols cover a broad spectrum of design dimensions from environmental setting on communication topology, to more technical features such as commitment strategy and even fundamental social choice related properties like order fairness. Designing and building BFT protocols remains a laborious task despite of years of intensive research. The proliferation of different BFT protocols has rendered it difficult to navigate BFT landscape, let alone determine the protocol that best meets application needs. This paper presents BEDROCK, a unified platform for BFT protocols design and implementation. BEDROCK exposes an API that presents a set of design choices capturing the trade-offs between different design space dimensions in BFT implementations. Based on user choices, BEDROCK then generates the BFT protocols within the space of plausible choices, evolves current protocols to generate new ones, and even uncovers previously unknown protocols. Our experimental results validate the capability of BEDROCK in deriving existing and new BFT protocols.

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“…Fairy [56] leverages TEEs as a layer on top of an ordering service to add fairness when executing client's requests. Troxy [41] uses a TEE to intercept client requests and replies as a proxy layer, resulting in removing the client-side library functionality and making the use of BFT transparent while improving performance.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

SplitBFT: Improving Byzantine Fault Tolerance Safety Using Trusted Compartments

Messadi¹,

Becker²,

Bleeke³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement (BFT) in a partially synchronous system usually requires 3𝑓 + 1 nodes to tolerate 𝑓 faulty replicas. Due to their high throughput and finality property BFT algorithms build the core of recent permissioned blockchains. As a complex and resource-demanding infrastructure, multiple cloud providers have started offering Blockchain-as-a-Service. This eases the deployment of permissioned blockchains but places the cloud provider in a central controlling position, thereby questioning blockchains' fault tolerance and decentralization properties and their underlying BFT algorithm.This paper presents SplitBFT, a new way to utilize trusted execution technology (TEEs), such as Intel SGX, to harden the safety and confidentiality guarantees of BFT systems thereby strengthening the trust in could-based deployments of permissioned blockchains. Deviating from standard assumptions, SplitBFT acknowledges that code protected by trusted execution may fail. We address this by splitting and isolating the core logic of BFT protocols into multiple compartments resulting in a more resilient architecture. We apply SplitBFT to the traditional practical byzantine fault tolerance algorithm (PBFT) and evaluate it using SGX. Our results show that SplitBFT adds only a reasonable overhead compared to the non-compartmentalized variant.

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Adding Fairness to Order: Preventing Front-Running Attacks in BFT Protocols using TEEs

Cited by 18 publications

References 27 publications

Exploring Unfairness on Proof of Authority: Order Manipulation Attacks and Remedies

Exploring Unfairness on Proof of Authority: Order Manipulation Attacks and Remedies

The Bedrock of Byzantine Fault Tolerance: A Unified Platform for BFT Protocol Design and Implementation

SplitBFT: Improving Byzantine Fault Tolerance Safety Using Trusted Compartments

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