Max Attestation Matters: Making Honest Parties Lose Their Incentives in Ethereum PoS

ePrint Report: Max Attestation Matters: Making Honest Parties Lose Their Incentives in Ethereum PoS

Mingfei Zhang, Rujia Li, Sisi Duan

We present staircase attack, the first attack on the incentive mechanism of the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol used in Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain. Our attack targets the penalty of the incentive mechanism that penalizes inactive participation. Our attack can make honest validators suffer from penalties, even if they strictly follow the specification of the protocol. We show both theoretically and experimentally …

attack attestation beacon eprint report ethereum ethereum 2.0 incentives making mechanism pos proof protocol report staircase stake