Speculative Denial-of-Service Attacks In Ethereum

The expressiveness of Turing-complete blockchains implies that verifying a transaction’s validity requires executing it on the current blockchain state. Transaction fees are designed to compensate actors for resources expended on transactions, but can only be charged from transactions included in blocks. In this work, the authors show that adversaries can craft malicious transactions that decouple the work imposed on blockchain actors from the compensation offered in return by introducing three attacks.