Related papers: Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurren…
With the surge in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, illegal mining for cryptocurrency has become a popular cyberthreat. Host-based cryptojacking, where malicious actors exploit victims systems to mine cryptocurrency without their…
BGP prefix hijacking is a critical threat to the resilience and security of communications in the Internet. While several mechanisms have been proposed to prevent, detect or mitigate hijacking events, it has not been studied how to…
The Bitcoin scalability problem has led to the development of off-chain financial mechanisms such as payment channel networks (PCNs) which help users process transactions of varying amounts, including micro-payment transactions, without…
Internet resources form the basic fabric of the digital society. They provide the fundamental platform for digital services and assets, e.g., for critical infrastructures, financial services, government. Whoever controls that fabric…
Proliferation of cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin) that allow pseudo-anonymous transactions, has made it easier for ransomware developers to demand ransom by encrypting sensitive user data. The recently revealed strikes of ransomware attacks…
BRC20 tokens are a type of non-fungible asset on the Bitcoin network. They allow users to embed customised content within Bitcoin's satoshis. The token frenzy reached a market size of US\$2.811\,b (2023Q3--2025Q1). However, this intuitive…
Everyone is concerned about the Internet security, yet most traffic is not cryptographically protected. The usual justification is that most attackers are only off-path and cannot intercept traffic; hence, challenge-response mechanisms…
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) remains a fragile pillar of Internet routing. BGP hijacks still occurr daily. While full deployment of Route Origin Validation (ROV) is ongoing, attackers have already adapted, launching post-ROV attacks…
An increasing number of systems have been proposed or deployed to the transit core of the Internet with the goal of observing and manipulating traffic in flight, systems we term Traffic Manipulating Boxes. Examples of these include: decoy…
In-browser cryptojacking involves hijacking the CPU power of a website's visitor to perform CPU-intensive cryptocurrency mining, and has been on the rise, with 8500% growth during 2017. While some websites advocate cryptojacking as a…
Attacks targeting network infrastructure devices pose a threat to the security of the internet. An attack targeting such devices can affect an entire autonomous system. In recent years, malware such as VPNFilter, Navidade, and SonarDNS has…
Payment channel networks (PCN) enable scalable blockchain transactions without fundamentally changing the underlying distributed ledger algorithm. However, routing a payment via multiple channels in a PCN requires locking collateral for…
Bitcoin is the world's first decentralized digital currency. Its main technical innovation is the use of a blockchain and hash-based proof of work to synchronize transactions and prevent double-spending the currency. While the qualitative…
Remote Code Execution (RCE) exploits pose a significant threat to AI and ML systems, particularly in GPU-accelerated environments where the computational power of GPUs can be misused for malicious purposes. This paper focuses on RCE attacks…
Blockchain denial of service (BDoS) and selfish mining are the two most crucial attacks on blockchain technology. A classical DoS attack targets the computer network to limit, restrict, or stop accessing the system of authorized users which…
The lack of security of the Internet routing protocol (BGP) has allowed attackers to divert Internet traffic and consequently perpetrate service disruptions, monetary frauds, and even citizen surveillance for decades. State-of-the-art…
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency attracting a lot of interest both from the general public and researchers. There is an ongoing debate on the question of users' anonymity: while the Bitcoin protocol has been designed to ensure that the activity…
We revisit the fundamental question of Bitcoin's security against double spending attacks. While previous work has bounded the probability that a transaction is reversed, we show that no such guarantee can be effectively given if the…
Lightning Network (LN) is a widely-used network of payment channels enabling faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions. In this paper, we outline three ways an attacker can steal funds from honest LN users. The attacks require dilating the…
The Bitcoin Lightning network is a mechanism to enable fast and inexpensive off-chain Bitcoin transactions using peer-to-peer (P2P) channels between nodes that can also be composed into a routing path. Although the resulting possible…