Ethereum Security Enhanced with Flash Freezing Flash Boys Protocol

The increasing threat of malicious MEV attacks on Ethereum has led researchers to propose new solutions for mitigating these risks. One such solution is the Flash Freezing Flash Boys (F3B) protocol, which uses threshold encryption to protect sensitive data in transactions.

Traditional threshold encryption systems have relied on per-epoch setups, where a single key is used to encrypt every transaction within a selected epoch. However, this creates a vulnerability where some transactions that fail to be included in the specified block may still be decrypted with the rest of the batch, exposing sensitive data and opening up MEV opportunities for validators.

F3B addresses this limitation by applying threshold encryption on a per-transaction basis, ensuring that each transaction remains confidential until it reaches finality. The protocol uses two different cryptographic protocols: TDH2 (Threshold Diffie-Hellman 2) and PVSS (Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing). While TDH2 is more efficient due to its fixed committee and constant-size threshold-encryption data, PVSS offers greater flexibility by allowing users to select the committee members responsible for their transaction.