Three Attacks on Proof-of-Stake Ethereum

Abstract

We propose a model suggesting that honest-but-rational consensus participants may play timing games, and strategically delay their block proposal to optimize MEV capture, while still ensuring the proposal's timely inclusion in the canonical chain. In this context, ensuring economic fairness among consensus participants is critical to preserving decentralization. We contend that a model grounded in honest-but-rational consensus participation provides a more accurate portrayal of behavior in economically incentivized systems such as blockchain protocols. We empirically investigate timing games on the Ethereum network and demonstrate that while timing games are worth playing, they are not currently being exploited by consensus participants. By quantifying the marginal value of time, we uncover strong evidence pointing towards their future potential, despite the limited exploitation of MEV capture observed at present.

A Study of Ethereum’s Transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake in Preventing Smart Contracts Criminal Activities

“…However, Ref. [23] presents an attack called the Refined Reorg Attack on the new PoS Ethereum network, which could allow validators to earn more from validating blocks than others through the Maximal Extractable Value [24]. Ref.…”

“…Ref. [23] details the attack as being that of a malicious actor who could propose a block in a slot, which keeps it hidden, while an honest block proposer would then place their block at the next slot, resulting in a bad actor being able to use both slots as a vote, which creates a probability that proposed blocks could be outnumbered by malicious actors.…”

Analysis of Committeeless Proof-of-Stake protocol: Searching for a better point of operation

“…Validation committees serve as an additional security measure by allowing a voting process to take place between a small set of trusted validators, but they create various attack surfaces, introduce additional implementation complexity, and reduce the overall decentralization of the blockchain. Recent developments in blockchain security research have shown that the voting process that takes place between validators can be exploited in order to delay the consensus and increase the profits of malicious actors [Neuder et al 2021], potentially at the cost of a considerably smaller fraction of the total stake in the network [Schwarz-Schilling et al 2022] than the previous estimates of 33% based on the solution to the byzantine generals problem [Lamport et al 1982].…”

Analysis of Blockchain Security: Classic Attacks, Cybercrime and Penetration Testing

“…validators are randomly chosen according to their financial participation, and are responsible for validating transactions and adding blocks to the chain. PoS is less energy-intensive than the PoW, but it does present the potential risk of centralizing power among holders of large quantities of tokens [11]. 3) Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS): it is used by the EOS and Tron blockchains.…”