Three technical aspects and security issues of Ethereum

Abstract

Ethereum is a blockchian-based technology that enables a public ledger to be created and maintained without a trusted third party. Ethereum uses elliptic curve cryptography to create accounts and signature, the consensus of PoW as well as PoS to verify transactions and create blocks, and stores data in the modified Merkle Patricia tree. This paper introduced the main three technical aspects of Ethereum and updated some concepts as its technology is updating over time. At the time of Ethereum's transition from PoW to PoS, this paper compared the two mechanism and concluded that PoS is more vulnerable to security issues and more analysis is needed to maintain its long-time security. The paper also discussed uncle block attack and proposed two possible strategies to prevent.