Economic Censorship Games in Fraud Proofs

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Berger, Ben, Felten, Edward W., Mamageishvili, Akaki, Sudakov, Benny
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Berger, Ben
Felten, Edward W.
Mamageishvili, Akaki
Sudakov, Benny
author_facet Berger, Ben
Felten, Edward W.
Mamageishvili, Akaki
Sudakov, Benny
contents Optimistic rollups rely on fraud proofs -- interactive protocols executed on Ethereum to resolve conflicting claims about the rollup's state -- to scale Ethereum securely. To mitigate against potential censorship of protocol moves, fraud proofs grant participants a significant time window, known as the challenge period, to ensure their moves are processed on chain. Major optimistic rollups today set this period at roughly one week, mainly to guard against strong censorship that undermines Ethereum's own crypto-economic security. However, other forms of censorship are possible, and their implication on optimistic rollup security is not well understood. This paper considers economic censorship attacks, where an attacker censors the defender's transactions by bribing block proposers. At each step, the attacker can either censor the defender -- depleting the defender's time allowance at the cost of the bribe -- or allow the current transaction through while conserving funds for future censorship. We analyze three game theoretic models of these dynamics and determine the challenge period length required to ensure the defender's success, as a function of the number of required protocol moves and the players' available budgets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_20334
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Economic Censorship Games in Fraud Proofs
Berger, Ben
Felten, Edward W.
Mamageishvili, Akaki
Sudakov, Benny
Computer Science and Game Theory
Optimistic rollups rely on fraud proofs -- interactive protocols executed on Ethereum to resolve conflicting claims about the rollup's state -- to scale Ethereum securely. To mitigate against potential censorship of protocol moves, fraud proofs grant participants a significant time window, known as the challenge period, to ensure their moves are processed on chain. Major optimistic rollups today set this period at roughly one week, mainly to guard against strong censorship that undermines Ethereum's own crypto-economic security. However, other forms of censorship are possible, and their implication on optimistic rollup security is not well understood. This paper considers economic censorship attacks, where an attacker censors the defender's transactions by bribing block proposers. At each step, the attacker can either censor the defender -- depleting the defender's time allowance at the cost of the bribe -- or allow the current transaction through while conserving funds for future censorship. We analyze three game theoretic models of these dynamics and determine the challenge period length required to ensure the defender's success, as a function of the number of required protocol moves and the players' available budgets.
title Economic Censorship Games in Fraud Proofs
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20334