Related papers: Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurren…
A widespread security claim of the Bitcoin system, presented in the original Bitcoin white-paper, states that the security of the system is guaranteed as long as there is no attacker in possession of half or more of the total computational…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
We focus on the problem of botnet orchestration and discuss how attackers can leverage decentralised technologies to dynamically control botnets with the goal of having botnets that are resilient against hostile takeovers. We cover critical…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of…
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…
The detection of BGP prefix hijacking attacks has been the focus of research for more than a decade. However, state-of-the-art techniques fall short of detecting more elaborate types of attack. To study such attacks, we devise a novel…
Cryptocurrencies are distributed systems that allow exchanges of native (and non-) tokens among participants. The complete historical bookkeeping and its wide availability opens up an unprecedented possibility, i.e. that of understanding…
The bitcoin peer-to-peer network has drawn significant attention from researchers, but so far has mostly focused on publicly visible portions of the network, i.e., publicly reachable peers. This mostly ignores the hidden parts of the…
As the deployment of comprehensive Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) security measures is still in progress, BGP monitoring continues to play a critical role in protecting the Internet from routing attacks. Fundamentally, monitoring involves…
Bitcoin is a decentralized P2P digital currency in which coins are generated by a distributed set of miners and transaction are broadcasted via a peer-to-peer network. While Bitcoin provides some level of anonymity (or rather pseudonymity)…
The Lightning Network is a scaling solution for Bitcoin that promises to enable rapid and private payment processing. In Lightning, multi-hop payments are secured by utilizing Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) and encrypted on the…
Traffic monetization is a crucial component of running most for-profit online businesses. One of its latest incarnations is cryptocurrency mining, where a website instructs the visitor's browser to participate in building a cryptocurrency…
Tor is vulnerable to network-level adversaries who can observe both ends of the communication to deanonymize users. Recent work has shown that Tor is susceptible to the previously unknown active BGP routing attacks, called RAPTOR attacks,…
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that features a distributed, decentralized and trustworthy mechanism, which has made Bitcoin a popular global transaction platform. The transaction efficiency among nations and the privacy benefiting from address…
In many blockchains, e.g., Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), the primary representation used for wallet addresses is a hardly memorable 40-digit hexadecimal string. As a result, users often select addresses from their recent transaction…
Our aim in this paper is to investigate the profitability of double-spending (DS) attacks that manipulate an a priori mined transaction in a blockchain. It was well understood that a successful DS attack is established when the proportion…
Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will attempt to construct the one-to-many…
The Bitcoin P2P network is at the core of all communications between clients. The reachable part of this network has been explored and analyzed by numerous studies. Unreachable nodes, however, are, in most part, overlooked. Nonetheless,…
Over the past decade, the Bitcoin P2P network protocol has become a reference model for all modern cryptocurrencies. While nodes in this network are known, the connections among them are kept hidden, as it is commonly believed that this…
Recently, several works conjectured the vulnerabilities of mainstream blockchains under several network attacks. All these attacks translate into showing that the assumptions of these blockchains can be violated in theory or under…