Towards Stronger Blockchains: Security Against Front-Running Attacks

TL;DR

This paper proposes causality preserving total order in blockchains to prevent front-running attacks, enhancing security and maintaining correct application semantics in Byzantine environments.

Contribution

Introduction of causality preserving total order to strengthen blockchain security against front-running attacks under Byzantine fault model.

Findings

Causality preserving total order effectively prevents front-running attacks.

Enhanced security ensures correct application semantics in Byzantine settings.

Proposed method outperforms traditional total ordering in security tests.

Abstract

Blockchains add transactions to a distributed shared ledger by arriving at consensus on sets of transactions contained in blocks. This provides a total ordering on a set of global transactions. However, total ordering is not enough to satisfy application semantics under the Byzantine fault model. This is due to the fact that malicious miners and clients can collaborate to add their own transactions ahead of correct clients' transactions in order to gain application level and financial advantages. These attacks fall under the umbrella of front-running attacks. Therefore, total ordering is not strong enough to preserve application semantics. In this paper, we propose causality preserving total order as a solution to this problem. The resulting Blockchains will be stronger than traditional consensus based blockchains and will provide enhanced security ensuring correct application semantics in a Byzantine setting.