Chain Reactions: How Nonce Collisions in ECDSA Compromise Polygon MEV Searchers
This work highlights a critical cryptographic vulnerability in production blockchain systems for MEV searchers, demonstrating how protocol-induced latency pressures lead to catastrophic security failures.
The paper uncovers systematic nonce reuse in ECDSA signatures within the Polygon MEV ecosystem, enabling complete private key recovery through elementary algebra. Analysis of on-chain data shows that searchers' predictable nonce patterns create linear relationships between signatures, allowing passive attackers to compromise multiple accounts.
ECDSA signatures form the bedrock of blockchain transaction authentication, yet their security critically depends on proper nonce generation. We uncover a critical vulnerability in the Polygon MEV ecosystem: systematic nonce reuse that enables complete private key recovery. Analyzing on-chain data reveals that searchers, driven by the need for sub-second response times in sealed-bid auctions, employ predictable nonce patterns. These patterns create linear relationships between signatures, allowing passive attackers to recover private keys using elementary algebra. We provide a compact linear-system formulation for such attacks, including the dangerous case of cross-wallet nonce collisions, and present concrete evidence of exploitable patterns on Polygon. Our findings demonstrate how protocol-induced latency pressures can lead to catastrophic cryptographic failures in production blockchain systems, where a single implementation error compromises multiple accounts simultaneously.