{"title":"Private attacks in longest chain proof-of-stake protocols with single secret leader elections","authors":"Sarah Azouvi, Daniele Cappelletti","doi":"10.1145/3479722.3480996","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Single Secret Leader Elections have recently been proposed as an improved leader election mechanism for proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains. However, the security gain they provide has not been quantified. In this work, we present a comparison of PoS longest-chain protocols that are based on Single Secret Leader Elections (SSLE) - that elect exactly one leader per round - versus those based on Probabilistic Leader Elections (PLE) - where one leader is elected on expectation. Our analysis shows that when considering the private attack - the worst attack on longest-chain protocols [14] - the security gained from using SSLE is substantial: the settlement time is decreased by ~ 25% for a 33% or 25% adversary. Furthermore, when considering grinding attacks, we find that the security threshold is increased by 10% (from 0.26 in the PLE case to 0.36 in the SSLE case) and the settlement time is decreased by roughly 70% for a 20% adversary in the SSLE case.","PeriodicalId":112726,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"7","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3479722.3480996","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 7
Abstract
Single Secret Leader Elections have recently been proposed as an improved leader election mechanism for proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains. However, the security gain they provide has not been quantified. In this work, we present a comparison of PoS longest-chain protocols that are based on Single Secret Leader Elections (SSLE) - that elect exactly one leader per round - versus those based on Probabilistic Leader Elections (PLE) - where one leader is elected on expectation. Our analysis shows that when considering the private attack - the worst attack on longest-chain protocols [14] - the security gained from using SSLE is substantial: the settlement time is decreased by ~ 25% for a 33% or 25% adversary. Furthermore, when considering grinding attacks, we find that the security threshold is increased by 10% (from 0.26 in the PLE case to 0.36 in the SSLE case) and the settlement time is decreased by roughly 70% for a 20% adversary in the SSLE case.