Paper 2025/1419 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/1419 ↗

BEAST-MEV: Batched Threshold Encryption with Silent Setup for MEV prevention

Abstract

Threshold encrypted mempools protect the privacy of transactions up until the point their inclusion on chain is confirmed. They are a promising approach to protection against front-running attacks on decentralized blockchains. Recent works have introduced two key properties that an encryption scheme must satisfy in order to scale to large scale decentralized blockchains such as Ethereum: Silent Setup [Garg-Kolonelos-Policharla-Wang, CRYPTO'24], demands that a threshold encryption scheme does not require any interaction during the setup phase and only relies on the existence of Public Key Infrastructure. Batched Decryption [Choudhuri-Garg-Piet-Policharla, USENIX'24], demands that an entire block containing $B$ encrypted transactions can be decrypted using communication that is independent of (or sublinear in) $B$, without compromising the privacy of transactions that have not yet been confirmed. While existing constructions achieve either Silent Setup or Batched Decryption independently, a truly decentralized and scalable encrypted mempool requires both properties to be satisfied simultaneously. In this work, we present the first ``Batched Threshold Encryption scheme with Silent Setup'' built using bilinear pairings. We provide formal definitions for the primitive, and prove security in the Generic Group Model. We provide several optimizations and implement our scheme to evaluate its performance. Our experiments demonstrate its efficiency for deployment in blockchain systems.