Defining and Preventing Asymmetric Mempool DoS in Ethereum with saferAd

TL;DR

This paper introduces saferAd, a secure mempool design for Ethereum that defends against asymmetric DoS attacks by providing formal safety guarantees and demonstrating minimal performance impact through real trace evaluation.

Contribution

The paper formulates safety definitions for asymmetric DoS attacks and proposes saferAd, a mempool framework that achieves eviction- and locking-safety with proven security bounds.

Findings

saferAd achieves eviction- and locking-safety.

Minimal latency and negligible impact on validator revenue.

Proven security bounds under attack models.

Abstract

This paper presents secure mempool designs under asymmetric DoS attacks. We formulate safety definitions under two abstract DoSes, namely eviction- and locking-based attacks. We propose a safe transaction admission framework for securing mempools, named saferAd, that achieves both eviction- and locking-safety. The proven security stems from an upper bound of the attack damage under locking DoSes and a lower bound of the attack cost under eviction DoSes. The evaluation by replaying real transaction traces shows saferAd incurs negligible latency or insignificant change of validator revenue.