Flash Freezing Flash Boys: Countering Blockchain Front-Running
Haoqian Zhang, Louis-Henri Merino, Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, and Bryan Ford
Decentralized Internet, Networks, Protocols,
and Systems (DINPS)
Bologna, Italy – July 10, 2022
Abstract:
Front-running, the practice of benefiting from advanced knowledge of pending
transactions, has proliferated in the cryptocurrency space with the emergence
of decentralized finance. Front-running causes devastating losses to honest
participants—estimated at $280M each month—and endangers the fairness of the
ecosystem. We present Flash Freezing Flash Boys (F3B), an architecture to
address front-running attacks by relying on a commit-and-reveal scheme where
the contents of a transaction are encrypted and later revealed by a
decentralized secret-management committee (SMC) when the transaction has been
committed by the underlying consensus layer. To maintain legacy compatibility,
we design F3B to be agnostic to the underlying consensus algorithm and
compatible with existing smart contracts. A preliminary exploration of F3B
shows that with a secret-management committee consisting of 8 and 128 members,
F3B presents between 0.1 and 2.2 second transaction-processing latency,
respectively.
Workshop paper:
PDF
Preprint of full paper:
arXiv
PDF