Adding Fairness to Order: Preventing Front-Running Attacks in BFT Protocols using TEEs

Stathakopoulou C, Schwarz-Rüsch S, Brandenburger M, Vukolić M (2021)

Publication Language: English

Publication Type: Conference contribution

Publication year: 2021

City/Town: Chicago, USA/virtual

Conference Proceedings Title: 40th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2021)

URI: http://vukolic.com/Fairy-CR.pdf

DOI: 10.1109/SRDS53918.2021.00013

Abstract

This paper presents Fairy: a modular system that augments any Total Order Broadcast (TOB) protocol with fairness properties, namely input (request) causality and sender obfuscation. With these properties, Fairy helps to prevent front-running attacks where an adversary can interfere with the order of requests depending on request payload and sender identity, allowing for substantial application-level consequences. 

Fairy leverages Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to implement fairness on top of a TOB-based ordering service. Fairy collocates TEEs with ordering service nodes effectively making them run as trusted proxies of actual TOB clients. TEEs help Fairy to achieve both input causality and sender obfuscation --- previous related systems addressing only input causality. 

We evaluate Fairy on top of a recent, efficient Byzantine FaultTolerant (BFT) TOB protocol and compare it to state-of-the-art BFT TOB with input causality. We show that Fairy improves state-of-the-art throughput by 66% and reduces latency by 50%.

Authors with CRIS profile

Signe Schwarz-Rüsch Lehrstuhl für Informatik 4 (Systemsoftware)

Involved external institutions

IBM Zurich Research Laboratory CH Switzerland (CH)

How to cite

APA:

Stathakopoulou, C., Schwarz-Rüsch, S., Brandenburger, M., & Vukolić, M. (2021). Adding Fairness to Order: Preventing Front-Running Attacks in BFT Protocols using TEEs. In 40th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2021). Chicago, USA/virtual.

MLA:

Stathakopoulou, Chrysoula, et al. "Adding Fairness to Order: Preventing Front-Running Attacks in BFT Protocols using TEEs." Proceedings of the International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems Chicago, USA/virtual, 2021.

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