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  4. Quantifying Liveness and Safety of Avalanche’s Snowball
 
conference paper

Quantifying Liveness and Safety of Avalanche’s Snowball

Kniep, Quentin
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Laval, Maxime
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Sliwinski, Jakub
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Garcia-Alfaro, Joaquin
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Barker, Ken
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April 2, 2025
Computer Security. ESORICS 2024 International Workshops - DPM, CBT, and CyberICPS, Bydgoszcz, 2024, Revised Selected Papers
19th International Workshop on Data Privacy Management, International Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology and Workshop on the Security of Industrial Control Systems and of Cyber-Physical Systems which were held in conjunction with the European Symposium on Research in Computer Security

This work examines the resilience properties of the Snowball and Avalanche protocols that underlie the popular Avalanche blockchain. We experimentally quantify the resilience of Snowball using a simulation implemented in Rust, where the adversary strategically rebalances the network to delay termination. We show that in a network of n nodes of equal stake, the adversary is able to break liveness when controlling Ω(n) nodes. Specifically, for n=2000, a simple adversary controlling 5.2% of stake can successfully attack liveness. When the adversary is given additional information about the state of the network (without any communication or other advantages), the stake needed for a successful attack is as little as 2.8%. We show that the adversary can break safety in time exponentially dependent on their stake, and inversely linearly related to the size of the network, e.g. in 265 rounds in expectation when the adversary controls 25% of a network of 3000. We conclude that Snowball and Avalanche are akin to Byzantine reliable broadcast protocols as opposed to consensus.

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