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Contribution Details
| Type | Master's Thesis |
| Scope | Discipline-based scholarship |
| Title | Agent Based Modeling Attack Vectors on Ethereum PoS Consensus |
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| Institution | University of Zurich |
| Faculty | Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics |
| Date | 2023 |
| Abstract Text | Quantifying the security of the consensus mechanism is usually complicated and performed in either a theoretical or computational fashion. The advantage of the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism is that its Sybil resistance mechanism makes it computationally difficult for an attacker to perform an attack. The attacker needs enough total hashing power to break the security of PoW. whereas the security of the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism is associated with measurable rewards or penalties on the initial deposit and is mostly theoretically proven. Ethereum’s consensus transition from PoW to PoS brought many attack vectors to light, as described in the papers (Neuder et al. 2021) (D’Amato et al. 2022) (Schwarz-Schilling, Neu, et al. 2021). Most of these attack vectors are mitigated before the transition. However, many new attack vectors might be seen in upcoming upgrades. We employed agent-based modeling to model network behavior computationally to help with modeling the attacks and their mitigations. Our experiment imitates network behavior using a sleek and sublime representation of a participant in the Ethereum PoS consensus. We performed experiments to test the network behavior under various average information propagation delays and to test the network against an ex-ante reorg attack and its mitigation. The agent in our experiment can model network effects under different stake distributions between honest and byzantine, numerous network topologies, and a broad variety of information transmission latencies. This report goes into detail about some fascinating observations regarding the average block transmission, the ex-ante reorg attack mitigation impact on the block tree evolution under Gasper consensus, as well as the rate of adversary block finality and the success rate of the ex-ante reorg attack based on the block timeliness. |
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