Censorship.WTF 2023
2023-11-18
Istanbul, Turkey
who it's for
ethereum developers, protocol engineers, validators and stakers, node operators, blockchain security engineers, privacy engineers, infrastructure operators, researchers of censorship resistance
topics
distributed validator technology (DVT); attester censorship observability; IPFS and ENS frontends; proposer-builder-sequencer (PBS) censorship; state proofs and transaction verification; encrypted mempools and inclusion lists; decentralized sequencing and relays; account abstraction censorship resistance; modular rollup attack surfaces; alternative data transport layers and mixnets; economic definitions of censorship resistance; deadline protocols with censorship detection
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Preventing Digital Totalitarianism | Juan Benet | 27m |
Argues that modern tech makes digital totalitarianism plausible: global surveillance (including 7 billion smartphones, CCTV, satellite imagery), AI that… | ||
| Hardening the Ethereum Ecosystem Across the Stack | Vitalik Buterin | 22m |
Ethereum faces concrete censorship vectors: centralized UIs (one address banned from Uniswap for Tornado use), dependence on ERC-1271 and centralized APIs, and… | ||
| Increasing the Observability of Attestor Censorship | Sreeram Kannan | 19m |
Proposes a concrete gadget called R gadget that changes the inclusion rule: proposers must include high-fee transactions seen in recent uncle blocks, so… | ||
| Improving Censorship Resistance Using DVT | Alon Muroch | 14m |
SSV's DVT splits an Ethereum validator into shared keys using BLS threshold signatures plus a lightweight consensus and optional DKG so no single operator… | ||
| Censorship From 0 to 60 | Costanza Gallo | 13m |
Covers three concrete censorship vectors: arrests of volunteers (France case where an uninvolved editor is detained), infrastructure pressure (GitHub repo… | ||
| Exploring Censorship Across The PBS Stack | Toni Wahrstätter | 15m |
Analysis of the PBS stack shows measurable censorship: a binomial test uses 2.18% of blocks contain OFAC content as p and flags low-inclusion operators… | ||
| State Proofs and Transaction Verification | Danno Ferrin | 18m |
Conference session argues that state proofs plus transaction verification let phones verify payments by shrinking proofs from kilobytes/megabytes to tens of… | ||
| The Dark Endgame of CL, EL & Application Layers Without IP-level Privacy | Sebastian Bürgel | 17m |
Claim: lack of IP‑level privacy lets infrastructure operators link ENS pages, IPFS DHT queries, Graph requests and RPC calls to real accounts and actions… | ||
| Are Solo Stakers Valuable for Censorship Resistance? | Nixo | 14m |
Solo stakers are a small share of total stake but often a large share of nodes, reported as 35–75% of nodes vs ~6.5% of validators, and they act as a… | ||
| Weak Censorship Resistance | Justin Drake | 18m |
Defines censorship with the append test: a publicly visible tx is censored from a block if it could have been appended but wasn’t. Distinguishes weak… | ||
| Alternate Frontends: Why and How | Henri Binsztok | 16m |
Deploys front ends to IPFS builds and points ENS at them but finds APIs and RPCs remain centralized, exposing projects to shutdown and the same injection… | ||
| Improving Deadline Protocols via Censorship Detection | Ed Felten | 19m |
Claim: an onchain one-sided error test detects absence of targeted censorship and lets deadline protocols shorten timeouts. Method: count empty slots vs… | ||
| Deep Dive into Private State and Execution of Smart Contract | Santiago Palladino | 17m |
Aztec Network implements private-first L2 execution by running contract functions client-side and producing per-call SNARKs that recursively aggregate in a… | ||
| Observability and Censorship in Ethereum | Sajida Zouarhi | 14m |
Shows measurable centralization and concrete gaps: 82% of blocks come from three builders, a user sent 5,000+ transactions to a private relay and a… | ||
| Account abstraction is easy… unless you care about censorship resistance | Yoav Weiss | 21m |
ERC 4337 implements account abstraction but adds concrete, nonobvious rules to keep relayer networks censorship resistant: it splits each request into… | ||
| Exploring Attacks in the Modular Rollup World | Nashqueue | 16m |
Argues that modular rollups inherit censorship risk from every delegated component and shows concrete attacks: DA layers can withhold or reorder shared… | ||
| Urgent Anti-Censorship Solution for Specific Transactions | Omar Espejel | 21m |
Proposal describes a narrowly scoped anti‑censorship mechanism for app chains that enforces force withdrawal and force trade transactions via an on‑chain… | ||
| An Economic Definition for Censorship Resistance | Mallesh M. Pai | 14m |
Defines censorship resistance = fee (cost to make a write fail) and shows time-sensitive ops like oracle updates, liquidations and on‑chain auctions fail if… | ||
| Alternate Data Transport Layers | Garrett MacDonald | 11m |
Claims that raw radio can submit blockchain transactions end to end: a single off‑internet transmitter and one internet‑connected receiver relay signed txs… | ||
| Beyond Exit and Voice | Venkatesh Rao | 20m |
Argues that crypto defaults to an exit bias and corporate-style efficiency, while censorship resistance is fundamentally a voice-oriented problem; uses… | ||
| nothing matches | ||