Helix: A Fair Blockchain Consensus Protocol Resistant to Ordering Manipulation

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

doi:10.1109/tnsm.2021.3052038

Cited by 20 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…This leads to a weaker liveness than normal BFT consensus, which requires waiting at most f rounds. There are two promising solutions (leader election policies) that can alleviate this liveness issue in SpeedyFair in implementation: (i) blacklist mechanism [31,35,37] and (ii) reputation mechanism [1,4,38,41]. The blacklist mechanism allows participants to maintain a list of replicas that are not eligible to become the leader.…”

Section: Reordering Attack During the Abnormal View-changementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, some reputation-based methods [4,10,22] are also proposed to help detect unfair censorship. In some situations, fairness is defined as giving each replica a fair opportunity to propose its requests using fair leader election or fair committee election [4,15,27,38]. These solutions, however, only partially offer order-fairness for transactions and are still vulnerable to various attacks.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Separation is Good: A Faster Order-Fairness Byzantine Consensus

Mu,

Yin,

Asheralieva

et al. 2024

Proceedings 2024 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

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Order-fairness has been introduced recently as a new property for Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol to prevent unilaterally deciding the final order of transactions, which allows mitigating the threat of adversarial transaction order manipulation attacks (e.g., front-running) in blockchain networks and decentralized finance (DeFi). However, existing leader-based order-fairness protocols (which do not rely on synchronized clocks) still suffer from poor performance since they strongly couple fair ordering with consensus processes. In this paper, we propose SpeedyFair, a high-performance orderfairness consensus protocol, which is motivated by our insight that the ordering of transactions does not rely on the execution results of transactions in previous proposals (after consensus). SpeedyFair achieves its efficiency through a decoupled design that performs fair ordering individually and consecutively, separating from consensus. In addition, by decoupling fair ordering from consensus, SpeedyFair enables parallelizing the order/verify mode that was originally executed serially in the consensus process, which further speeds up the performance. We implement a prototype of SpeedyFair on the top of the Hotstuff protocol. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that SpeedyFair significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art order-fairness protocol (i.e., Themis), which achieves a throughput of 1.5×-2.45× greater than Themis while reducing latency by 35%-59%.

show abstract

Section: Reordering Attack During the Abnormal View-changementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Separation is Good: A Faster Order-Fairness Byzantine Consensus

Mu,

Yin,

Asheralieva

et al. 2024

Proceedings 2024 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Finally, some papers suggest encrypting transactions and only revealing their content after a consensus is reached on the list and order of transactions included in the next block. [34] proposes a novel distributed ledger consensus protocol which uses threshold encryption to hide the content of transactions before a consensus is reached and enough honest parties agree to proceed. Their solution is elegant and provides strong privacy guarantees; however, (1) it requires a more complex validation procedure than Ethereum, (2) needs an impractical number of network nodes, and (3) fails to prevent the elected leader from adding some of its own encrypted transactions to the start of the block.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, Helix [34] seems to offer the best guarantees of any system. However, as mentioned earlier, it requires a complete change of the consensus protocol and does not prevent validators from adding their own transaction at arbitrary positions in the block.…”

Section: Mev Is a Miner's Gamementioning

confidence: 99%

Extracting Godl [sic] from the Salt Mines: Ethereum Miners Extracting Value

Julien¹,

Fairoze²,

Weaver³

2022

Preprint

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Cryptocurrency miners have great latitude in deciding which transactions they accept, including their own, and the order in which they accept them. Ethereum miners in particular use this flexibility to collect MEV-Miner Extractable Valueby structuring transactions to extract additional revenue. Ethereum also contains numerous bots that attempt to obtain MEV based on public-but-not-yet-confirmed transactions. Private relays shelter operations from these selfsame bots by directly submitting transactions to mining pools.In this work, we develop an algorithm to detect MEV exploitation present in previously mined blocks. We use our implementation of the detector to analyze MEV usage and profit redistribution, finding that miners make the lion's share of the profits, rather than independent users of the private relays. More specifically, (i) 73% of private transactions hide trading activity or re-distribute miner rewards, and 87.6% of MEV collection is accomplished with privately submitted transactions, (ii) our algorithm finds more than $6M worth of MEV profit in a period of 12 days, two thirds of which go directly to miners, and (iii) MEV represents 9.2% of miners' profit from transaction fees.Furthermore, in those 12 days, we also identify four blocks that contain enough MEV profits to make time-bandit forking attacks economically viable for large miners, undermining the security and stability of Ethereum as a whole.

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“…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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Helix: A Fair Blockchain Consensus Protocol Resistant to Ordering Manipulation

Cited by 20 publications

References 15 publications

Separation is Good: A Faster Order-Fairness Byzantine Consensus

Separation is Good: A Faster Order-Fairness Byzantine Consensus

Extracting Godl [sic] from the Salt Mines: Ethereum Miners Extracting Value

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

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