Paper 2025/1719
Bribers, Bribers on The Chain, Is Resisting All in Vain? Trustless Consensus Manipulation Through Bribing Contracts
, Eötvös Loránd University, Aarhus University, Eötvös Loránd University, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest University of Technology and EconomicsAbstract
The long-term success of cryptocurrencies largely depends on the incentive compatibility provided to the validators. Bribery attacks, facilitated trustlessly via smart contracts, threaten this foundation. This work introduces, implements, and evaluates three novel and efficient bribery contracts targeting Ethereum validators. The first bribery contract enables a briber to fork the blockchain by buying votes on their proposed blocks. The second contract incentivizes validators to voluntarily exit the consensus protocol, thus increasing the adversary's relative staking power. The third contract builds a trustless bribery market that enables the briber to auction off their manipulative power over the RANDAO, Ethereum's distributed randomness beacon. Finally, we provide an initial game-theoretical analysis of one of the described bribery markets.
Note: Updated version. Added Related work and minor improvements.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- Keywords
- Proof-of-stakeConsensus ManipulationBribery AttacksSmart ContractsEthereum
- Contact author(s)
-
bence sooki toth @ gmail com
seresistvanandras @ gmail com
kamillak2001 @ gmail com
nagyabi @ gmail com
pejo @ crysys hu
biczok @ crysys hu - History
- 2026-01-12: last of 2 revisions
- 2025-09-21: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2025/1719
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/1719,
author = {Bence Soóki-Tóth and István András Seres and Kamilla Kara and Ábel Nagy and Balázs Pejó and Gergely Biczók},
title = {Bribers, Bribers on The Chain, Is Resisting All in Vain? Trustless Consensus Manipulation Through Bribing Contracts},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/1719},
year = {2025},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1719}
}
