Market Manipulation as a Security Problem
This addresses the issue of unfair trading for investors and regulators, but it is incremental as it builds on existing regulatory efforts without introducing a new technical solution.
The paper tackles the problem of market manipulation through mechanical arbitrage in equity exchanges, providing the first overview of the threat landscape and discussing mitigation measures to thwart these practices.
Order matching systems form the backbone of modern equity exchanges, used by millions of investors daily. Thus, their operation is strictly controlled through numerous regulatory directives to ensure that markets are fair and transparent. Despite these efforts, market manipulation remains an open problem. In this work, we focus on a class of market manipulation techniques that exploit technical details and glitches in the operation of the exchanges (i.e., mechanical arbitrage). Such techniques are used by predatory traders with deep knowledge of the exchange's structure to gain an advantage over the other market participants. We argue that technical solutions to the problem of mechanical arbitrage have the potential to significantly thwart these practices. Our work provides the first overview of the threat landscape, models fair markets and their security assumptions, and discusses various mitigation measures.