# The Attack of the Clones Against Proof-of-Authority

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes vulnerabilities in proof-of-authority blockchain consensus protocols, introducing the Cloning Attack, which successfully compromises Aura and Clique protocols, highlighting security weaknesses in these systems.

## Contribution

It formalizes Aura and Clique protocols and demonstrates a novel Cloning Attack that can double-spend with minimal malicious nodes, exposing security flaws.

## Key findings

- Cloning Attack always succeeds against Aura
- Cloning Attack is twice as fast and mostly successful against Clique
- Highlights security vulnerabilities in proof-of-authority protocols

## Abstract

In this paper, we explore vulnerabilities and countermeasures of the recently proposed blockchain consensus based on proof-of-authority. The proof-of-work blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, have been shown both theoretically and empirically vulnerable to double spending attacks. This is why Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithms have gained popularity in the blockchain context for their ability to tolerate a limited number t of attackers among n participants. We formalize the recently proposed proof-of-authority consensus algorithms that are Byzantine fault tolerant by describing the Aura and Clique protocols present in the two mainstream implementations of Ethereum. We then introduce the Cloning Attack and show how to apply it to double spend in each of these protocols with a single malicious node. Our results show that the Cloning Attack against Aura is always successful while the same attack against Clique is about twice as fast and succeeds in most cases.