Recently, two attacks were presented against Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum: one where short-range reorganizations of the underlying consensus chain are used to increase individual validators’ profits and delay consensus decisions, and one where adversarial network delay is leveraged to stall consensus decisions indefinitely. We provide refined variants of these attacks, considerably relaxing the requirements on adversarial stake and network timing, and thus rendering the attacks more severe. Combining techniques from both refined attacks, we obtain a third attack which allows an adversary with vanishingly small fraction of stake and no control over network message propagation (assuming instead probabilistic message propagation) to cause even long-range consensus chain reorganizations. Honest-but-rational or ideologically motivated validators could use this attack to increase their profits or stall the protocol, threatening incentive alignment and security of PoS Ethereum. The attack can also lead to destabilization of consensus from congestion in vote processing.
CITATION STYLE
Schwarz-Schilling, C., Neu, J., Monnot, B., Asgaonkar, A., Tas, E. N., & Tse, D. (2022). Three Attacks on Proof-of-Stake Ethereum. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 13411 LNCS, pp. 560–576). Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18283-9_28
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