Researchers presented at USENIX Security on August 12 a Solana Proof-of-History clock attack leveraging TowerBFT behavior to stretch a leader’s effective block window. Called Time Inflation, the attack allows a malicious leader to re-anchor a block to an earlier logical time point, thereby depriving honest validators of opportunities. The threat model assumes an adversary controlling less than 33% of stake with no control over the network scheduler. Anza’s 50,000 SOL Alpenglow competition excluded this vulnerability class because the behavior was only reachable when Alpenglow was inactive, placing it in the TowerBFT domain. Alpenglow is designed to remove these prerequisites by replacing TowerBFT and Proof-of-History with Votor, but no paper-specific public analysis has been published on transition risks.
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