Competition, Collusion, and Corruption: The Spectrum of MEV Attacks on DAG-Based BFT Consensus Protocols
Researchers map the MEV attack space for DAG-based BFT consensus protocols, showing all six evaluated production protocols are vulnerable to at least some attacks.
The paper organizes maximal extractable value (MEV) attacks on DAG-based Byzantine Fault-Tolerant consensus protocols into an attack space with four families: adversary, protocol, target, and deployment. Experiments isolating individual dimensions empirically measure each dimension's effect on attack success rates across six production DAG-based BFT protocols. Every evaluated protocol is vulnerable to at least a subset of the MEV attacks, and which attacks succeed is mostly dictated by the protocol's own design rather than attacker effort.
- Attack space organized into four families: adversary, protocol, target, and deployment.
- Experiments isolate single dimensions across six production DAG-based BFT protocols.
- Every evaluated protocol is vulnerable to at least a subset of MEV attacks.
- Attack success depends mostly on protocol design rather than attacker effort.
Full article265 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols guarantee safety and liveness despite the malicious failure of nodes. However, they do not prevent adversarial manipulation of transaction order, where the order a proposer assigns diverges from the order in which clients submitted their transactions. Exploiting this discretion for profit is known as maximal extractable value (MEV), and it is intensified in DAG-based BFT protocols, where every replica proposes blocks concurrently rather than routing transactions through a single designated proposer each round. The proliferation of MEV attacks on DAG-based BFT protocols has made the resulting landscape difficult to navigate: attacks are reported individually, on different protocols, and under different metrics, making it unclear whether two attacks differ fundamentally or merely in how they are described. This paper closes that gap by presenting an attack space for MEV on DAG-based BFT protocols, organized around four families: the adversary, the protocol, the target, and the deployment. For each family, we identify the dimensions that shape an attack's impact. Each point in the attack space fixes one value per dimension, thereby representing a distinct, potential MEV attack, which can then be instantiated on a specific DAG-based BFT protocol. We perform a set of experiments, each isolating a single dimension where the protocol permits it, to empirically measure its effect on the success rate of MEV attacks against six production DAG-based BFT protocols. Our experimental evaluation reveals that every protocol we evaluate is vulnerable to at least a subset of the MEV attacks in this space, and that which attacks succeed is mostly dictated by the protocol's own design rather than by attacker effort.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20069