Ethereum Researchers Propose New Threshold Encryption Design to Mitigate MEV Attacks

A recent study has shed light on a new threshold encryption design called Flash Freezing Flash Boys (F3B) that aims to mitigate MEV attacks on Ethereum. F3B ensures that each transaction remains confidential until it reaches finality, reducing the risk of front-running.

The protocol works by encrypting transactions with a lightweight symmetric key, which is then encrypted and stored along with the transaction data. This approach can reduce the amount of data that needs to be asymmetrically encrypted by up to ~10 times for a simple swap transaction.

F3B can be implemented with two different cryptographic protocols: TDH2 (Threshold Diffie-Hellman 2) or PVSS (Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing). While TDH2 is more efficient, it requires a fixed committee and constant-size threshold-encryption data. PVSS, on the other hand, gives users more flexibility in selecting committee members but comes with larger public-key ciphertexts and higher computational overhead.

The prototype implementation of F3B on simulated proof-of-stake Ethereum showed that it has minimal performance overhead, with a delay incurred after finality of only 197 ms for TDH2 and 205 ms for PVSS. Storage overhead is just 80 bytes per transaction for TDH2, while PVSS's overhead grows linearly with the number of trustees.