Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2609.28115

No Place to Hide: An Analysis on Protected Order Flow Sandwich Attacks

Lioba Heimbach·Ozan Solmaz·Burak Öz·Christof Ferreira Torres
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Front-running has long plagued Ethereum's public mempool, earning it the nickname of a "dark forest", where predators lurk for profitable transactions. In response, Ethereum and other blockchain ecosystems increasingly rely on private RPCs and native protections to shield transactions from adversaries, which we refer to as protected order flow. Yet the effectiveness of these mechanisms in preventing front-running, and what trust assumptions they entail, remain poorly understood. In this work, we conduct the first longitudinal, three-year measurement study of sandwich attacks against protected order flow across six blockchains: Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Base, Arbitrum, and Monad. We introduce detection heuristics that capture wide attacks, both within and across blocks, and filter on bot behavior to distinguish sandwiches from legitimate trading activity. We identify 28.0 million sandwich attacks on Solana, 38,567 on Tron, 30,607 on Ethereum, and 1,889 on Base against transactions intended to be protected from front-running. Reorged blocks expose a further 2,875 Ethereum victims. Unlike conventional public-mempool sandwiches, these attacks rarely occur tightly around their victims and, outside Solana, are carried out by a small number of entities. Our analysis uncovers exposures at every layer: validator- and application-level exposure on Solana, order-flow auctions and reorged blocks on Ethereum, first-come-first-served ordering that fails to prevent latency-based front-running on Tron, and both an RPC bug that exposes pending transactions and predictable victim behavior on Base. These findings show that existing front-running protections can provide substantially weaker guarantees than users expect, highlighting the need for stronger end-to-end defenses against sandwich attacks.

Explore related subjects

cs.CR

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Lioba Heimbach, Ozan Solmaz, Burak Öz, Christof Ferreira Torres. 2026-09-23. No Place to Hide: An Analysis on Protected Order Flow Sandwich Attacks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28115

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

The shifted-prime Erdős-Wintner law for primitive-root determinant densities: extremal order, dimension zero, and Fourier decay

For a prime $p$, let $c(p)=\frac{φ(p-1)}{p-1}\prod_{j\ge1}(1-p^{-j})$, the limiting density of matrices over $\mathbb F_p$ with primitive-root determinant. Its limiting law over the primes is the classical continuous shifted-totient law on $[0,1/2]$. We prove Hausdorff dimension zero and vanishing lower and upper dyadic $L^q$ dimensions for $q>1$. Its image $μ_f$ under $x\mapsto-\log x$ is Rajchman. As $T\to\infty$, for $U_T$ uniform on $[0,T]$, $\log|\widehat{μ_f}(U_T)|/\log\log T\to-1$ in probability. For every $A>0$, $|\widehat{μ_f}(τ)|\le(\log\log T)^4/\log T$ outside a subset of $[0,T]$ of relative measure $O_A((\log T)^{-A})$. As $h\downarrow0$, $\sup_aμ_f([a,a+h])=\mathfrak S_2e^{-γ}/\log(1/h)+O(\log^{-2}(1/h))$, where $\mathfrak S_2$ is the twin-prime singular series; maximizing left endpoints lie within $h$ of $\log3$ for small $h$. We prove $\min_{p\le x}c(p)\sim e^{-γ}/\log\log x$ and $\limsup_{p\to\infty}(c(p)\log\log p)^{-1}=e^γ$. The limiting law of $\log(φ(p+1)/φ(p-1))$ has support $\mathbb R$ and Hausdorff dimension zero. For the classical law of $σ(p-1)/(p-1)$ on $[3/2,\infty)$, we prove dimension zero, a sharp left-endpoint asymptotic, and a Rajchman logarithmic image. Its odd-prime component has an entire Mellin transform of order one. Partial-factorization bounds yield certified asymptotic searches for fully splitting negacyclic number-theoretic transform primes with prescribed reciprocal-density bounds at fixed power-of-two length. We determine the second distinct squared norm of $A_{n_1}\otimes\cdots\otimes A_{n_k}$ for $k,n_i\ge2$, yielding exact cyclotomic codifferent shell gaps and a uniform smoothing asymptotic at $ε=2^{-cφ(m)}$ for $c>2\log_2(1+\sqrt6)$. These results are unconditional. An explicit unproved exponent-pair hypothesis yields $|\widehat{μ_f}(τ)|=O(1/\log\log|τ|)$.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Studying Detection Rule Generation as a Unified Task

Security systems use detection rules to identify suspicious activity. Existing studies often investigate rule generation for specific security systems, devoting substantial effort to developing dedicated methods and evaluation setups. Such customization contributes to fragmented research, limiting method reuse and result comparability across systems. We therefore study detection rule generation as a unified task across diverse natural language inputs and rule languages. To support method reuse, we propose UniRule, which abstracts diverse rules into shared natural language representations for retrieval. To enable consistent evaluation, we introduce a protocol that compares rules under shared criteria and aggregates the results into method scores. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of UniRule and the reliability of the evaluation protocol. They also show that method performance in one setting can be predicted from results in others, with average error close to that obtained using that setting's own data. These findings support studying detection rule generation as a unified task.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Analyzing Defensive Misdirection Against Model-Guided Automated Attacks on Agentic AI Systems

Agentic AI systems increasingly rely on language-model components to interpret instructions, process external data, invoke tools, and coordinate with other agents. These capabilities make prompt-injection and jailbreak attacks more consequential, especially as attackers adopt model-guided automation to scale probing, prompt refinement, and response evaluation. This work analyzes the resulting attack-defense setting through a probabilistic model of a target system, its defense mechanism, and the attacker's automated judge. Our analysis shows that conventional detect-and-block defenses can allow attacker success rate (ASR) to approach one as the query budget grows, since predictable refusals provide useful feedback to automated search. We then examine detect-and-misdirect, where detected malicious interactions receive controlled, non-operational responses designed to induce false-positive errors in the attacker's judge. This strategy reduces the positive predictive value of attacker-selected candidates and yields a bounded asymptotic ASR. We evaluate a proof-of-concept realization of this strategy through Contextual Misdirection via Progressive Engagement (CMPE), a lightweight conversational misdirection method designed to replace predictable refusal text with safe but strategically misleading responses in automated jailbreak settings. On jailbreak benchmarks, CMPE reduces estimated ASR upper bounds by up to two orders of magnitude and nearly eliminates verified attack success in end-to-end experiments with PAIR, GPTFuzz, and AutoDAN-Turbo.

cs.CR↗