Paper 2022/1066

FairBlock: Preventing Blockchain Front-running with Minimal Overheads

Peyman Momeni, University of Waterloo
Sergey Gorbunov, University of Waterloo
Bohan Zhang, University of Waterloo
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 of N transactions, the number of messages sent across the network only grows linearly with the size of decrypting committees, S. That is, to decrypt a set of N transactions sequenced at a specific block, a committee only needs to exchange S decryption shares (independent of N ). 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 × 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.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Published elsewhere. EAI SecureComm 2022 - 18th EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks
Keywords
identity-based encryption front-running MEV Blockchain networks smart contracts threshold encryption
Contact author(s)
pmomeni @ uwaterloo ca
sgorbunov @ uwaterloo ca
b327zhan @ uwaterloo ca
History
2022-08-17: approved
2022-08-16: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2022/1066
License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC BY-NC-ND

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/1066,
      author = {Peyman Momeni and Sergey Gorbunov and Bohan Zhang},
      title = {FairBlock: Preventing Blockchain Front-running with Minimal Overheads},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2022/1066},
      year = {2022},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1066}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1066}
}
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