First Flight #18: T-Swap

Summary

In Ethereum, miners have some control over the timestamp of the blocks they mine. This flexibility allows them to include or exclude certain transactions in a block and manipulate the timestamp within a certain range. Miners can slightly adjust the block.timestamp to make certain transactions valid or invalid depending on their preference. For example, if the deadline is set to block.timestamp, a miner could manipulate the timestamp to expire a transaction that they don't want to include or to profit from it in some other way.

Impact

Using block.timestamp as the deadline parameter in a swap function on a Uniswap V1 clone can introduce a risk of Miner Extractable Value (MEV).

Tools Used

Manual review

Recommendations

1. Add a deadline parameter to the sellPoolTokens function to protect users from MEV attacks.

2. Use Flashbots Protect to call the transactions to avoid MEV attacks.