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Eating Sandwiches: Modular and Lightweight Elimination of Transaction Reordering Attacks

Authors Orestis Alpos , Ignacio Amores-Sesar , Christian Cachin , Michelle Yeo

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Distributed systems security
Keywords
  • Consensus
  • MEV
  • Byzantine behavior
  • Rational behavior

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Abstract

Traditional blockchains grant the miner of a block full control not only over which transactions but also their order. This constitutes a major flaw discovered with the introduction of decentralized finance and allows miners to perform MEV attacks. In this paper, we address the issue of sandwich attacks by providing a construction that takes as input a blockchain protocol and outputs a new blockchain protocol with the same security but in which sandwich attacks are not profitable. Furthermore, our protocol is fully decentralized with no trusted third parties or heavy cryptography primitives and carries a linear increase in latency and minimum computation overhead.

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Orestis Alpos, Ignacio Amores-Sesar, Christian Cachin, and Michelle Yeo. Eating Sandwiches: Modular and Lightweight Elimination of Transaction Reordering Attacks. In 27th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 286, pp. 12:1-12:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2023.12

Author Details

Orestis Alpos
  • Institute of Computer Science, University of Bern, Switzerland
Ignacio Amores-Sesar
  • Institute of Computer Science, University of Bern, Switzerland
Christian Cachin
  • Institute of Computer Science, University of Bern, Switzerland
Michelle Yeo
  • IST Austria, Klosterneuburg, Austria

Funding

This work has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under grant agreement Nr . 200021_188443 (Advanced Consensus Protocols).

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Krzysztof Pietrzak and Jovana Mićić for useful discussions.

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