Mitigating Front-Running Attacks through Fair and Resilient Transaction Dissemination

Mitigating Front-Running Attacks through Fair and Resilient Transaction Dissemination (arXiv:2609.24713v1), submitted on September 21, 2026, introduces HERMES, a novel mempool dissemination protocol designed to prevent front-running attacks by ensuring dissemination fairness and fault tolerance.

• Core Mechanism: HERMES utilizes a Threshold Random Seed (TRS) scheme to randomly select from multiple robust overlay structures for each transaction, preventing adversaries from predicting dissemination paths to gain timing advantages.
• Accountability: The protocol enforces accountability by requiring nodes to prove adherence to the designated dissemination policies and overlay structures, allowing the system to detect and exclude deviant nodes.
• Performance: Experimental results demonstrate that HERMES achieves significant performance improvements over traditional broadcast protocols, balancing low latency with high resilience against Byzantine actors in both permissioned and permissionless blockchains.

Problem framing. The paper treats front-running as a dissemination and ordering problem rather than solely a consensus-layer attack. In modern blockchains, transactions move through multiple stages—creation, mempool propagation, and block dissemination—before they are included in the chain. If certain nodes or proposers learn pending transactions earlier, more completely, or with more favorable timing than others, they can exploit that information advantage by submitting competing transactions. The central argument is that efficient, fair, and fault-tolerant transaction dissemination is therefore a prerequisite for reducing front-running, because the attack surface exists before blocks are finalized.

Contributions. Building on existing mempool protocols that already attempt to coordinate transaction visibility, the work contributes a fair and resilient transaction dissemination approach aimed at limiting information asymmetry. The key insight is that fairness can be strengthened by controlling when and how transaction information is exposed across the network: dissemination should be equitable among honest participants, robust to node failures or adversarial delays, and aligned with block propagation so that proposers do not receive privileged early knowledge. The contribution is thus a protocol-level strategy that balances latency, availability, and censorship resistance while making it harder to construct profitable front-running strategies based on network position, timing, or partial visibility.

Why it matters. Front-running undermines fairness in DeFi and other latency-sensitive applications, and it can concentrate economic advantage among well-connected or strategically placed actors. By addressing the transaction lifecycle end-to-end, the work offers a pathway toward more equitable transaction ordering and more robust blockchain performance. It is relevant to protocol designers, network architects, and researchers interested in reducing MEV-style attacks without sacrificing the throughput, resilience, and scalability required by large-scale distributed ledgers.