FIRST: FrontrunnIng Resilient Smart ConTracts

Abstract

Owing to the meteoric rise in the usage of cryptocurrencies, there has been a widespread adaptation of traditional financial applications such as lending, borrowing, margin trading, and more, to the cryptocurrency realm. In some cases, the inherently transparent and unregulated nature of cryptocurrencies leads to attacks on users of these applications. One such attack is frontrunning, where a malicious entity leverages the knowledge of currently unprocessed financial transactions submitted by users and attempts to get its own transaction(s) executed ahead of the unprocessed ones. The consequences of this can be financial loss, inaccurate transactions, and even exposure to more attacks. We propose FIRST, a framework that prevents frontrunning attacks, and is built using cryptographic protocols including verifiable delay functions and aggregate signatures. In our design, we have a federated setup for generating the public parameters of the VDF, thus removing the need for a single trusted setup. We formally analyze FIRST, prove its security using the Universal Composability framework and experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of FIRST.