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F3B: A Low-Overhead Blockchain Architecture with Per-Transaction Front-Running Protection

Authors Haoqian Zhang, Louis-Henri Merino, Ziyan Qu, Mahsa Bastankhah, Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, Bryan Ford

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Author Details

Haoqian Zhang
  • École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Louis-Henri Merino
  • École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Ziyan Qu
  • École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Mahsa Bastankhah
  • École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Vero Estrada-Galiñanes
  • École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Bryan Ford
  • École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Funding

This research was supported in part by U.S. Office of Naval Research grant N00014-19-1-2361, the AXA Research Fund, the PAIDIT project funded by ICRC, the IC3-Ethereum Fund, Algorand Centres of Excellence programme managed by Algorand Foundation, and armasuisse Science and Technology. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding sources.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Cristina Basescu, Pasindu Nivanthaka Tennage, Pierluca Borsò-Tan, and Simone Colombo for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions and especially thank Shufan Wang for prototyping F3B on the Ethereum blockchain.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Haoqian Zhang, Louis-Henri Merino, Ziyan Qu, Mahsa Bastankhah, Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, and Bryan Ford. F3B: A Low-Overhead Blockchain Architecture with Per-Transaction Front-Running Protection. In 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 282, pp. 3:1-3:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.3

Abstract

Front-running attacks, which benefit from advanced knowledge of pending transactions, have proliferated in the blockchain space since the emergence of decentralized finance. Front-running causes devastating losses to honest participants and continues to endanger the fairness of the ecosystem. We present Flash Freezing Flash Boys (F3B), a blockchain architecture that addresses front-running attacks by using threshold cryptography. In F3B, a user generates a symmetric key to encrypt their transaction, and once the underlying consensus layer has finalized the transaction, a decentralized secret-management committee reveals this key. F3B mitigates front-running attacks because, before the consensus group finalizes it, an adversary can no longer read the content of a transaction, thus preventing the adversary from benefiting from advanced knowledge of pending transactions. Unlike other mitigation systems, F3B properly ensures that all unfinalized transactions, even with significant delays, remain private by adopting per-transaction protection. Furthermore, F3B addresses front-running at the execution layer; thus, our solution is agnostic to the underlying consensus algorithm and compatible with existing smart contracts. We evaluated F3B on Ethereum with a modified execution layer and found only a negligible (0.026%) increase in transaction latency, specifically due to running threshold decryption with a 128-member secret-management committee after a transaction is finalized; this indicates that F3B is both practical and low-cost.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Distributed systems security
Keywords
  • Blockchain
  • DeFi
  • Front-running Mitigation

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