Huibo Wang (Baidu Security), Guoxing Chen (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Yinqian Zhang (Southern University of Science and Technology), Zhiqiang Lin (Ohio State University)

Proof-of-Elapsed-Time (POET) is a blockchain consensus protocol in which each participating node is required to wait for the passage of a specified time duration before it can participate in the block leader election in each round. It relies on trusted execution environments, such as Intel SGX, to ensure its security, and has been implemented in Hyperledger Sawtooth and used in many real-world settings. This paper examines the security issues including fairness guarantees of the Sawtooth’s POET design and implementation, and discovers a new category of security attacks against POET, dubbed Multi-Certificate Attacks, which allows a malicious node to unfairly create multiple Certificates in each round of block leader election and select the one that maximizes her probability of winning. We have systematically analyzed the root causes of these attacks and assisted the Sawtooth community to fix several vulnerabilities in the latest version of POET. To further mitigate the identified threats, we propose a new design of POET in this paper, which we call POETA, that can be used to address the remaining vulnerabilities we have discovered. We have implemented POETA and evaluated its security and performance.

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Weikeng Chen (DZK/UC Berkeley), Thang Hoang (Virginia Tech), Jorge Guajardo (Robert Bosch Research and Technology Center), Attila A. Yavuz (University of South Florida)

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DRAWN APART: A Device Identification Technique based on Remote...

Tomer Laor (Ben-Gurion Univ. of the Negev), Naif Mehanna (Univ. Lille, CNRS, Inria), Antonin Durey (Univ. Lille, CNRS, Inria), Vitaly Dyadyuk (Ben-Gurion Univ. of the Negev), Pierre Laperdrix (Univ. Lille, CNRS, Inria), Clémentine Maurice (Univ. Lille, CNRS, Inria), Yossi Oren (Ben-Gurion Univ. of the Negev), Romain Rouvoy (Univ. Lille, CNRS, Inria / IUF), Walter Rudametkin…

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What You See is Not What the Network Infers:...

Yijun Yang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Ruiyuan Gao (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Yu Li (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Qiuxia Lai (Communication University of China), Qiang Xu (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

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Drivers and Passengers Maybe the Weakest Link in the...

Aiping Xiong (Pennsylvania State University), Zekun Cai (Pennsylvania State University) and Tianhao Wang (University of Virginia)

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