(Disclaimer: I am not endorsing Hedera Hashgraph in any way)
I played with the Hashgraph consensus a while back, and understand how it works rather well. Not a PhD, so feel free to disregard my comment entirely
The vulnerability you described depends on how exactly you use HashGraph. If you wait for a transaction to receive a round receivable, then your vulnerability doesn’t work. Consider the algorithm on page 14. The median timestamp is computed among the events that are reachable from the round r
unique famous witness, where r
is the round receivable of the event with the transaction in question.
Assuming other proofs in the paper are not wrong, once the round receivable is assigned it doesn’t change, the unique famous witness is known by definition, and doesn’t change either, thus the set of events reachable from it doesn’t change as well, neither does a median timestamp of them.
Note that if you don’t wait for the round receivable to be assigned before executing smart contracts, that your timing attack is also somewhat incomplete, because the events are first sorted by the round receivable and only then by timestamp, and since you don’t know the round receivable for the event yet, you cannot just look at the timestamps of two events to attempt to predict their order.
Unrelatedly, something I personally found funny about hashgraph is their coin rounds (see bottom part of page 10). They effectively say that their voting for famous witnesses can stall under certain conditions, and to account for that every now and then they would have all the witnesses vote randomly, and since there’s a chance that 2/3 of votes will end up being the same, that will unstall the algorithm. This can give you an estimate of how many witnesses they plan to run, because even for 20 witnesses the chance that in 20 coin tosses more than 2/3 will end up the same is very low.