Uncle Maker: (Time)Stamping Out The Competition in Ethereum

Abstract

We present and analyze an attack on Ethereum 1's consensus mechanism, which allows miners to obtain higher mining rewards compared to their honest peers. This attack is novel in that it relies on manipulating block timestamps and the difficulty-adjustment algorithm (DAA) to give the miner an advantage whenever block races ensue. We call our attack Uncle Maker, as it induces a higher rate of uncle blocks. We describe several variants of the attack. Among these, one that is risk-free for miners.