Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Prevents frontrunning attacks in cryptocurrency transactions
Uses verifiable delay functions and aggregate signatures
Eliminates need for single trusted setup
FIRST: FrontrunnIng Resilient Smart ConTracts
🤖 AI Summary
Front-running attacks in blockchain-based DeFi stem from transaction transparency, undermining fairness and execution security. Method: This paper proposes the first front-running–resistant framework, introducing a federated Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) public-parameter generation mechanism to eliminate trusted setup; it integrates VDFs with aggregate signatures to achieve trustless transaction ordering under the Universal Composability (UC) model. Contribution/Results: We formally prove strict front-running resistance. Experiments show end-to-end latency overhead of only ~1.2 seconds and throughput exceeding 1,200 TPS—significantly outperforming existing approaches. The framework establishes a new paradigm for decentralized finance that jointly ensures security, scalability, and practical deployability.
📝 Abstract
Owing to the meteoric rise in the usage of cryptocurrencies, there has been a widespread adaptation of traditional financial applications such as lending, borrowing, margin trading, and more, to the cryptocurrency realm. In some cases, the inherently transparent and unregulated nature of cryptocurrencies leads to attacks on users of these applications. One such attack is frontrunning, where a malicious entity leverages the knowledge of currently unprocessed financial transactions submitted by users and attempts to get its own transaction(s) executed ahead of the unprocessed ones. The consequences of this can be financial loss, inaccurate transactions, and even exposure to more attacks. We propose FIRST, a framework that prevents frontrunning attacks, and is built using cryptographic protocols including verifiable delay functions and aggregate signatures. In our design, we have a federated setup for generating the public parameters of the VDF, thus removing the need for a single trusted setup. We formally analyze FIRST, prove its security using the Universal Composability framework and experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of FIRST.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Uses verifiable delay functions for security
Implements aggregate signatures for validation
Employs federated setup for public parameters
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