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Order Policy Enforcement: Limitations and Circumvention

Series: Department Seminar

Speaker: Dr Kartik Nayak

Date/Time: Dec 11 10:30:00

Location: CSA Lecture Hall (Room No. 112, Ground Floor)

Abstract:
Order manipulation attacks such as frontrunning and sandwiching have become an
increasing concern in blockchain applications such as DeFi. To protect from such
attacks, several recent works have designed order policy enforcement (OPE) protocols
to order transactions fairly in a data-independent fashion. However, while the
manipulation attacks are motivated by monetary profits, the defenses assume
honesty among a significantly large set of participants. In existing protocols,
if all participants are rational, they may be incentivized to collude and circumvent
the order policy without incurring any penalty.

This work makes two key contributions. First, we explore whether the need for the
honesty assumption is fundamental. Indeed, we show that it is impossible to design
OPE protocols under some requirements when all parties are rational. Second, we explore
the tradeoffs needed to circumvent the impossibility result. In the process, we propose
a novel concept of rationally binding transactions that allows us to construct AnimaguSwap,
the first content-oblivious Automated Market Makers (AMM) that is secure under rationality.

Speaker Bio:
Kartik Nayak is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Duke University and a staff researcher at Espresso Systems. He works in blockchains and applied cryptography. Before joining Duke University, he spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at VMware Research. Before that, he graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park. He has served on program committees of several top-tier conferences, such as IEEE SP, ACM CCS, PODC, VLDB, Asiacrypt, and PoPETS. Kartik is a recipient of the 2016 Google Ph.D. fellowship in Security. His research is funded by the NSF CAREER Award, several NSF SaTC Awards, VMware Early Career Grant Award, Novi, Zcash Foundation, and Ethereum Foundation.

Host Faculty: Prof. Bhavana Kanukurthi