2026-09-21T22:45:59Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/129500 2026-02-05 col_2142_5131 col_2142_8888 com_2142_5130 com_2142_8887 com_2142_234

application/pdf en text Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'U of I Access', the embargo will last until 2027-05-01 The student, Yunqi Li, accepted the attached license on 2025-03-10 at 13:02. The student, Yunqi Li, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-03-10 at 13:14. This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-03-14 at 09:44. DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #21665 on 2025-10-19 at 19:14:22 Mitigations of potential miner extractable value attacks in decentralized financial systems Li, Yunqi 2025-03-14 Miller, Andrew Miller, Andrew Levchenko, Kirill Ren, Ling Borisov, Nikita Miner Extractable Value (MEV) Multi-Party Computation (MPC) Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) eng Miner Extractable Value (MEV) poses a significant challenge to the integrity and fairness of blockchain ecosystems. This issue arises when block proposers exploit their authority to insert and reorder transactions before block finalization, extracting value from ordinary users. However, this can be effectively mitigated through the implementation of cryptographic primitives, specifically Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). These solutions offer mitigation at a manageable cost, albeit with a nuanced shift in the trust model. For TEE, this shift entails a greater reliance on chip manufacturers, entrusting them to eschew backdoors and promptly address side-channel attacks. In the case of MPC, the trust is redistributed to trust an extra typically smaller committee of MPC nodes, with an understanding that some performance trade-offs may be necessary, but within acceptable limits. This thesis aims to explore the balance between enhanced MEV protection and the intricate dynamics of altered trust models alongside the performance trade-offs inherent in adopting these advanced cryptographic methods. Additionally, this thesis addresses potential silent system failures, such as undetected MEV attacks stemming from discrepancies between software implementations and theoretical protocols, proposing a last-resort methodology to demonstrate the existence of such failures. 2025-05 Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129500 Copyright 2025 Yunqi Li Electrical & Computer Eng Electrical & Computer Engr University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Ph.D. Dissertation