Defining and Preventing Asymmetric Mempool DoS in Ethereum with saferAd

Abstract: This paper presents secure mempool designs under asymmetric DoS attacks. We formulate safety definitions under two abstract DoSes, namely eviction- and locking-based attacks. We propose a safe transaction admission framework for securing mempools, named saferAd, that achieves both eviction- and locking-safety. The proven security stems from an upper bound of the attack damage under locking DoSes and a lower bound of the attack cost under eviction DoSes. The evaluation by replaying real transaction traces shows saferAd incurs negligible latency or insignificant change of validator revenue.