Secret Leader Election in Ethereum PoS: An Empirical Security Analysis of Whisk and Homomorphic Sortition under DoS on the Leader and Censorship Attacks

Abstract: Proposer anonymity in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains is a critical concern due to the risk of targeted attacks such as malicious denial-of-service (DoS) and censorship attacks. While several Secret Single Leader Election (SSLE) mechanisms have been proposed to address these threats, their practical impact and trade-offs remain insufficiently explored. In this work, we present a unified experimental framework for evaluating SSLE mechanisms under adversarial conditions, grounded in a simplified yet representative model of Ethereum's PoS consensus layer. The framework includes configurable adversaries capable of launching targeted DoS and censorship attacks, including coordinated strategies that simultaneously compromise groups of validators. We simulate and compare key protection mechanisms - Whisk, and homomorphic sortition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comparative study to examine adversarial DoS scenarios involving multiple attackers under diverse protection mechanisms. Our results show that while both designs offer strong protection against targeted DoS attacks on the leader, neither defends effectively against coordinated attacks on validator groups. Moreover, Whisk simplifies a DoS attack by narrowing the target set from all validators to a smaller list of known candidates. Homomorphic sortition, despite its theoretical strength, remains impractical due to the complexity of cryptographic operations over large validator sets.