Parinya Ekparinya (University of Sydney), Vincent Gramoli (University of Sydney and CSIRO-Data61), Guillaume Jourjon (CSIRO-Data61)

The vulnerability of traditional blockchains have been demonstrated at multiple occasions. Various companies are now moving towards Proof-of-Authority (PoA) blockchains with more conventional Byzantine fault tolerance, where a known set of n permissioned sealers, among which no more than t are Byzantine, seal blocks that include user transactions. Despite their wide adoption, these protocols were not proved correct.

In this paper, we present the Cloning Attack against the two mostly deployed PoA implementations of Ethereum, namely Aura and Clique. The Cloning Attack consists of one sealer cloning its pair of public-private keys into two distinct Ethereum instances that communicate with distinct groups of sealers. To identify their vulnerabilities, we first specify the corresponding algorithms. We then deploy one testnet for each protocol and demonstrate the success of the attack with only one Byzantine sealer. Finally, we propose counter-measures that prevent an adversary from double spending and introduce the necessary number of sealers needed to decide a block depending on n and t for both Aura and Clique to be safe.

View More Papers

Prevalence and Impact of Low-Entropy Packing Schemes in the...

Alessandro Mantovani (EURECOM), Simone Aonzo (University of Genoa), Xabier Ugarte-Pedrero (Cisco Systems), Alessio Merlo (University of Genoa), Davide Balzarotti (EURECOM)

Read More

HFL: Hybrid Fuzzing on the Linux Kernel

Kyungtae Kim (Purdue University), Dae R. Jeong (KAIST), Chung Hwan Kim (NEC Labs America), Yeongjin Jang (Oregon State University), Insik Shin (KAIST), Byoungyoung Lee (Seoul National University)

Read More

ProtectIOn: Root-of-Trust for IO in Compromised Platforms

Aritra Dhar (ETH Zurich), Enis Ulqinaku (ETH Zurich), Kari Kostiainen (ETH Zurich), Srdjan Capkun (ETH Zurich)

Read More

Towards Plausible Graph Anonymization

Yang Zhang (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Mathias Humbert (armasuisse Science and Technology), Bartlomiej Surma (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Praveen Manoharan (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Jilles Vreeken (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Michael Backes (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)

Read More