Ethereum Proof-of-Stake under Scrutiny
Résumé
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 protocols designs (BFT and Nakomoto-style), now has an involved 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 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.
Mots clés
Liveness
Availability
Bouncing attack
Ethereum
Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
2012 ACM Subject Classification Theory of computation → Distributed algorithms
Computer systems organization → Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks phrases Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
Bouncing attack Digital Object Identifier 10.4230/OASIcs
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