We identify a subtle security issue that impacts mechanism design in scenarios in which agents can absolutely commit to strategies. Absolute commitments allow the strategy of an agent to depend on the commitments made by the other agents. This changes fundamental game-theoretic assumptions by inducing a meta-game in which agents choose which strategies they commit to. We say that a game that is unaffected by such commitments is Stackelberg resilient and show that computing it is intractible in general, although it can be computed efficiently for two-player games of perfect information. We show the intuitive, but technically non-trivial result, that, if a game is resilient when some number of players have the capacity to make commitments, it is also resilient when these commitments are available to fewer players. We demonstrate the non-triviality of Stackelberg resilience by analyzing two escrow mechanisms from the literature. These mechanisms have the same intended functionality, but we show that only one is Stackelberg resilient. Our model is particularly relevant in Web3 scenarios, where these absolute commitments can be realized by the automated and irrevocable nature of smart contracts. Our work highlights an important issue in ensuring the secure design of Web3. In particular, our work suggests that smart contracts already deployed on major blockchains may be susceptible to these attacks.

翻译：我们识别了一个微妙的安全问题，该问题影响代理能够绝对承诺策略场景中的机制设计。绝对承诺允许代理的策略依赖于其他代理作出的承诺。这通过引入一个元博弈（在该元博弈中，代理选择其承诺的策略）改变了基本的博弈论假设。我们将不受此类承诺影响的博弈称为斯塔克伯格弹性博弈，并证明通常计算该性质是棘手的，尽管对于完美信息的双人博弈可以有效计算。我们展示了一个直观但技术上非平凡的结果：如果某个博弈在若干玩家具备承诺能力时具有弹性，那么当这些承诺只对更少玩家可用时，该博弈同样具有弹性。通过分析文献中的两种托管机制，我们展示了斯塔克伯格弹性的非平凡性。这些机制具有相同的预期功能，但我们证明只有一种具有斯塔克伯格弹性。我们的模型在Web3场景中尤其相关，在这些场景中，绝对承诺可通过智能合约的自动化与不可撤销特性实现。我们的工作揭示了确保Web3安全设计中的一个重要问题。特别地，我们的研究暗示，已在主要区块链上部署的智能合约可能容易受到这些攻击的影响。