English

Defining and Preventing Asymmetric Mempool DoS in Ethereum with saferAd

Cryptography and Security 2024-07-17 v5

Abstract

This paper presents secure mempool designs under asymmetric DoS attacks. We formulate safety definitions under two abstract DoSes, namely eviction- and locking-based attacks. We propose a safe transaction admission framework for securing mempools, named saferAd, that achieves both eviction- and locking-safety. The proven security stems from an upper bound of the attack damage under locking DoSes and a lower bound of the attack cost under eviction DoSes. The evaluation by replaying real transaction traces shows saferAd incurs negligible latency or insignificant change of validator revenue.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.11721,
  title  = {Defining and Preventing Asymmetric Mempool DoS in Ethereum with saferAd},
  author = {Wanning Ding and Yibo Wang and Yuzhe Tang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.11721},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

The definitions of mempool eviction security and locking security are not comprehensive. The security model lacks a proof and verification of the security bounds on a real Ethereum client