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Ethereum Proof-of-Stake under Scrutiny

Authors:

Ulysse Pavloff,

Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou,

Sara Tucci-PiergiovanniAuthors Info & Claims

SAC '23: Proceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

Pages 212 - 221

https://doi.org/10.1145/3555776.3577655

Published: 07 June 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Ethereum has undergone a recent change called the Merge, which made Ethereum a Proof-of-Stake blockchain shifting closer to BFT consensus. Ethereum, which wished to keep the best of the two protocol designs (BFT and Nakomoto-style), now has a convoluted consensus protocol as its core. The result is a blockchain being possibly produced in a tree-like form while participants try to finalize blocks. Several attacks jeopardizing liveness have been found in this new setting. The Ethereum community has responded by creating a patch. We discovered a new attack on the patched protocol. To support our analysis, we propose a new high-level formalization of the properties of liveness and availability of the Ethereum blockchain, and we provide a pseudo-code. We believe this formalization to be helpful for other analyses as well. Our results yield that the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake has probabilistic liveness, influenced by the parameter describing the time frame allowed for validators to change their mind about the current main chain.

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Cited By

Mcnally KKolivand H(2024)Comparative Analysis of Bitcoin Mining Machines and Their Global Environmental ImpactICST Transactions on Scalable Information Systems10.4108/eetsis.595411Online publication date: 30-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.4108/eetsis.5954
Mišić VNaderi Mighan SMišić JChang X(2024)Decentralization Is Good or Not? Defending Consensus in Ethereum 2.0Blockchains10.3390/blockchains20100012:1(1-19)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/blockchains2010001
Gómez-Goiri AGutierrez-Aguero IGarcia-Estevez D(2024)Leveraging Blockchain Usage to Enhance Slag ExchangeApplied Sciences10.3390/app1414624314:14(6243)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/app14146243
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Ethereum Proof-of-Stake under Scrutiny
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks
2. Theory of computation
  1. Design and analysis of algorithms
    1. Distributed algorithms

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SAC '23: Proceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

March 2023

1932 pages

ISBN:9781450395175

DOI:10.1145/3555776

Conference Chairs:
Jiman Hong
Soongsil University, South Korea
,
Maart Lanperne
Tallinn University, Estonia
,
Program Chairs:
Juw Won Park
University of Louisville, USA
,
Tomas Cerny
Baylor University, USA
,
Publication Chair:
Hossain Shahriar
Kennesaw State University, USA

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGAPP: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 June 2023

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SAC '23

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SIGAPP

SAC '23: 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

March 27 - 31, 2023

Tallinn, Estonia

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

March 31 - April 4, 2025

Catania , Italy

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Cited By

Mcnally KKolivand H(2024)Comparative Analysis of Bitcoin Mining Machines and Their Global Environmental ImpactICST Transactions on Scalable Information Systems10.4108/eetsis.595411Online publication date: 30-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.4108/eetsis.5954
Mišić VNaderi Mighan SMišić JChang X(2024)Decentralization Is Good or Not? Defending Consensus in Ethereum 2.0Blockchains10.3390/blockchains20100012:1(1-19)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/blockchains2010001
Gómez-Goiri AGutierrez-Aguero IGarcia-Estevez D(2024)Leveraging Blockchain Usage to Enhance Slag ExchangeApplied Sciences10.3390/app1414624314:14(6243)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/app14146243
Lao CZhou SZhang LZhang FWang KZhou LQin K(2024)Unpacking Long-Latency Transactions in EthereumProceedings of the Workshop on Decentralized Finance and Security10.1145/3689931.3694909(11-20)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689931.3694909
Laneve CSolmonte SVeschetti A(2024)A Stochastic Analysis of the Gasper Protocol2024 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops and other Affiliated Events (PerCom Workshops)10.1109/PerComWorkshops59983.2024.10502866(518-523)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/PerComWorkshops59983.2024.10502866
Kensuke I(2024)Cryptoeconomics and Tokenomics as Economics: A Survey with Opinions2024 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)10.1109/ICBC59979.2024.10634383(729-746)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICBC59979.2024.10634383
Pavloff UAmoussou-Guenou YTucci-Piergiovanni S(2024)Byzantine Attacks Exploiting Penalties in Ethereum PoS2024 54th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)10.1109/DSN58291.2024.00020(53-65)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/DSN58291.2024.00020
Tian XZhuang ZZhang L(2024)Redesign Incentives in Proof-of-Stake Ethereum: An Interdisciplinary Approach of Reinforcement Learning and Mechanism Design2024 6th International Conference on Data-driven Optimization of Complex Systems (DOCS)10.1109/DOCS63458.2024.10704461(16-24)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/DOCS63458.2024.10704461
Ballweg JCai ZGoharshady A(2023)PureLottery: Fair Leader Election without Decentralized Random Number Generation2023 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)10.1109/Blockchain60715.2023.00051(273-280)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain60715.2023.00051
Hamdi AFourati LAyed S(2023)Vulnerabilities and attacks assessments in blockchain 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0: tools, analysis and countermeasuresInternational Journal of Information Security10.1007/s10207-023-00765-023:2(713-757)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10207-023-00765-0

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