Mitigating Front-Running Attacks through Fair and Resilient Transaction Dissemination
In modern blockchains, efficient, fair, and faulttolerant information dissemination is critical for performance and security. Several stages of the transaction lifecycle are affected, from the creation and dissemination of transactions to the dissemination of blocks in the consensus layer. Mempool protocols, such as L{Ø}, already address some of modern blockchains' security threats. However, others remain unless fairness is embedded most fundamentally in the dissemination layer used by these protocols to share transactions and blocks and to reconcile mempools. This paper introduces HERMES, a novel dissemination protocol for mempools that leverages robust minimal structures to optimize data propagation, balance load, and ensure fairness despite faults and Byzantine actors. Specifically, we address front-running attacks by randomizing the choice of an overlay structure while forcing nodes to prove adherence to the mempools' dissemination policies and the random choice made. Experimental results show significant performance improvements compared to traditional broadcast protocols for both permissioned and permissionless blockchains.