Abstract
Blockchains add transactions to a distributed shared ledger by arriving at consensus on sets of transactions contained in blocks. This provides a total ordering on a set of global transactions. However, total ordering is not enough to satisfy application semantics under the Byzantine fault model. This is due to the fact that malicious miners and clients can collaborate to add their own transactions ahead of correct clients’ transactions in order to gain application level and financial advantages. These attacks fall under the umbrella of front-running attacks. In this paper, we propose causality preserving total order as a solution to this problem. The resulting blockchains will be stronger than traditional consensus based blockchains and will provide enhanced security ensuring correct application semantics in a Byzantine setting.
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Notes
- 1.
BRB requires an upper bound of t Byzantine processes out of (\(3t+1\)) processes. In our case, the client becomes the \((3t+2)^{th}\) process in the system when broadcasting to the system of miners via BRB. In case the broadcasting client is Byzantine, correctness of the protocol can only be guaranteed when at most \((t-1)\) miners are Byzantine.
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Misra, A., Kshemkalyani, A.D. (2024). Towards Stronger Blockchains: Security Against Front-Running Attacks. In: Castañeda, A., Enea, C., Gupta, N. (eds) Networked Systems. NETYS 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14783. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-67321-4_11
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