Related papers: Theoretical Bitcoin Attacks with less than Half of…
Many large decentralized systems rely on information propagation to ensure their proper function. We examine a common scenario in which only participants that are aware of the information can compete for some reward, and thus informed…
This paper puts a new light on secure data storage inside distributed systems. Specifically, it revisits computational secret sharing in a situation where the encryption key is exposed to an attacker. It comes with several contributions:…
We analyze bribing attacks in Proof-of-Stake distributed ledgers from a game theoretic perspective. In bribing attacks, an adversary offers participants a reward in exchange for instructing them how to behave, with the goal of attacking the…
In this paper we explore several contexts where an adversary has an upper hand over the defender by using special hardware in an attack. These include password processing, hard-drive protection, cryptocurrency mining, resource sharing, code…
The evaluation of logic locking methods has long been predicated on an implicit assumption that only the correct key can unveil the true functionality of a protected circuit. Consequently, a locking technique is deemed secure if it resists…
We discuss a new attack, termed a dimension or linear decomposition attack, on several known group-based cryptosystems. This attack gives a polynomial time deterministic algorithm that recovers the secret shared key from the public data in…
We provide a general methodology for analyzing defender-attacker based "games" in which we model such games as Markov models and introduce a capacity region to analyze how defensive and adversarial strategies impact security. Such a…
The mining of bitcoin is modeled using system dynamics, showing that the past evolution of the network hash rate can be explained to a large extent by an efficient market hypothesis applied to the mining of blocks. The possibility of a…
Although system administrators are frequently urged to protect the machines in their network, the fact remains that the decision to protect is far from universal. To better understand this decision, we formulate a decision-theoretic model…
Despite the fact that it is publicly available, collecting and processing the full bitcoin blockchain data is not trivial. Its mere size, history, and other features indeed raise quite specific challenges, that we address in this paper. The…
Bitcoin-NG is among the first blockchain protocols to approach the \emph{near-optimal} throughput by decoupling blockchain operation into two planes: leader election and transaction serialization. Its decoupling idea has inspired a new…
Payment channel networks provide a fast and scalable solution to relay funds, acting as a second layer to slower and less scalable blockchain protocols. In this paper, we present an accessible, low-cost attack in which the attacker…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular consensus protocol used by Bitcoin since its inception. PoW has the well-known flaw of assigning all the reward to the single miner (or pool) that inserts the new block. This has the consequence of making…
Mining pools, the main components of the Bitcoin network, dominate the computing resources and play essential roles in network security and performance aspects. Although many existing measurements of the Bitcoin network are available,…
We design and validate new block propagation protocols for the peer-to-peer (P2P) network of the Bitcoin blockchain. Despite its strong protection for security and privacy, the current Bitcoin blockchain can only support a low number of…
We correct the double spend race analysis given in Nakamoto's foundational Bitcoin article and give a closed-form formula for the probability of success of a double spend attack using the Regularized Incomplete Beta Function. We give a…
This discussion applies quantitative finance methods and economic arguments to cryptocurrencies in general and bitcoin in particular -- as there are about $10,000$ cryptocurrencies, we focus (unless otherwise specified) on the most…
Bitcoin was recently introduced as a peer-to-peer electronic currency in order to facilitate transactions outside the traditional financial system. The core of Bitcoin, the Blockchain, is the history of the transactions in the system…
There had been well known claims of unconditionally secure quantum protocols for bit commitment. However, we, and independently Mayers, showed that all proposed quantum bit commitment schemes are, in principle, insecure because the sender,…
Today, Internet communication security has become more complex as technology becomes faster and more efficient, especially for resource-limited devices such as embedded devices, wireless sensors, and radio frequency identification (RFID)…