Chain Reactions: How Nonce Collisions in ECDSA Compromise Polygon MEV Searchers

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 3 May 2026] Chain Reactions: How Nonce Collisions in ECDSA Compromise Polygon MEV Searchers Yash Madhwal, Andrey Seoev, Raffaele Della Pietra, Anastasiia Smirnova, Yury Yanovich 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. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2605.21498 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.21498v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.21498 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yury Yanovich [view email] [v1] Sun, 3 May 2026 18:29:35 UTC (73 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)