Research Article
FairBlock: Preventing Blockchain Front-Running with Minimal Overheads
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-031-25538-0_14, author={Peyman Momeni and Sergey Gorbunov and Bohan Zhang}, title={FairBlock: Preventing Blockchain Front-Running with Minimal Overheads}, proceedings={Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. 18th EAI International Conference, SecureComm 2022, Virtual Event, October 2022, Proceedings}, proceedings_a={SECURECOMM}, year={2023}, month={2}, keywords={Blockchain Front-running DeFi Identity-based encryption Smart contract Security}, doi={10.1007/978-3-031-25538-0_14} }- Peyman Momeni
Sergey Gorbunov
Bohan Zhang
Year: 2023
FairBlock: Preventing Blockchain Front-Running with Minimal Overheads
SECURECOMM
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-25538-0_14
Abstract
While blockchain systems are quickly gaining popularity, front-running remains a major obstacle to fair exchange. In this paper, we show how to apply identity-based encryption (IBE) to prevent front-running with minimal bandwidth overheads. In our approach, to decrypt a block ofNtransactions, the number of messages sent across the network only grows linearly with the size of decrypting committees,S. That is, to decrypt a set ofNtransactions sequenced at a specific block, a committee only needs to exchangeSdecryption shares (independent ofN). In comparison, previous solutions are based on threshold decryption schemes, where each transaction in a block must be decrypted separately by the committee, resulting in bandwidth overhead of(N \times S). Along the way, we present a model for fair block processing and build a prototype implementation. We show that on a sample of 1000 messages with 1000 validators our system saves 42.53 MB of bandwidth which is 99.6% less compared with the standard threshold decryption paradigm.
