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

Learning-based Practical Smartphone Eavesdropping with Built-in Accelerometer

Zhongjie Ba (Zhejiang University and McGill University), Tianhang Zheng (University of Toronto), Xinyu Zhang (Zhejiang University), Zhan Qin (Zhejiang University), Baochun Li (University of Toronto), Xue Liu (McGill University), Kui Ren (Zhejiang University)

Read More

Decentralized Control: A Case Study of Russia

Reethika Ramesh (University of Michigan), Ram Sundara Raman (University of Michgan), Matthew Bernhard (University of Michigan), Victor Ongkowijaya (University of Michigan), Leonid Evdokimov (Independent), Anne Edmundson (Independent), Steven Sprecher (University of Michigan), Muhammad Ikram (Macquarie University), Roya Ensafi (University of Michigan)

Read More

Melting Pot of Origins: Compromising the Intermediary Web Services...

Takuya Watanabe (NTT), Eitaro Shioji (NTT), Mitsuaki Akiyama (NTT), Tatsuya Mori (Waseda University, NICT, and RIKEN AIP)

Read More

Secure Sublinear Time Differentially Private Median Computation

Jonas Böhler (SAP Security Research), Florian Kerschbaum (University of Waterloo)

Read More