Arbitrage Attack: Miners of the World, Unite!

Abstract

Blockchain oracles are introduced to mitigate the gap between blockchain-based applications and real-world information. To solve the centralization problem of current oracle systems, many decentralized protocols have been designed. In this paper, we define the basic model for decentralized oracles that rely on unencrypted transactions for verification and adjustment tasks. Furthermore, we introduce Arbitrage attack against such decentralized oracles carried out by rational miners and mining pools. We analyze the attack based on game-theoretic methods. Moreover, we briefly discuss the price of anarchy to demonstrate the characteristic of attackers’ cooperation union under different circumstances.