On Identifying Sound Conditions for Frontrunning Resistance

Abstract: Blockchains enable decentralized applications through smart contracts---interactive programs executed through consensus. However, the inherently asynchronous nature of blockchain transaction ordering introduces a class of vulnerabilities known as frontrunning attacks, which have caused millions of dollars in losses in major blockchains, such as Ethereum. Frontrunning attacks arise because users interact with smart contracts through transactions, which are added to the blockchain by designated nodes called miners. Miners can exploit their ability to reorder, delay, or insert transactions to gain an advantage over honest users, effectively frontrunning them. Yet, to date, the field lacks a rigorous definition of what it even means for a contract to resist such attacks. Worse, we show that existing dynamic detection approaches are fundamentally inadequate: in a large-scale study comprising 287 smart contract audits, 55% of the 393 reported vulnerabilities identified by leading smart contract auditors fall outside the scope of state-of-the-art detection criteria. To address this gap, we propose the first formal definition of frontrunning vulnerability for smart contracts. Our definition captures a key insight: resistance to frontrunning is not an intrinsic property of a contract alone, but depends critically on how honest users interact with it. Grounded in this observation, we develop a sound algorithm for synthesizing secure interaction conditions, alongside a prototype implementation that we apply to audited real-world contracts---revealing previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in two Ethereum contracts.