Max Attestation Matters: Making Honest Parties Lose Their Incentives in Ethereum PoS

We present staircase attack, the first attack on the incentive mechanism of the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol used in the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain. Our attack can make honest validators suffer from penalties, even if they strictly follow the specifications of the protocol. We show theoretically that if the adversary controls 29.6% stake in a moderate-size system, the attack can be launched continuously, so eventually all honest validators will lose their incentives. We implement the staircase attack in our artifact and evaluate the effect of the staircase attack on a local-built testnet with 1,000 clients. The results match our theoretical analysis. This artifact aims to reproduce the results in Section 5 of our paper.