Related papers: An Analysis of Attacks on Blockchain Consensus
This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain PoW consensus on how the existence of multiple misbehaving miners influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner (or attacker interchangeably)…
Censorship resilience is a fundamental assumption underlying the security of blockchain protocols. Additionally, the analysis of blockchain security from an economic and game theoretic perspective has been growing in popularity in recent…
In this paper we propose a double-linked blockchain data structure that greatly improves blockchain performance and guarantees single chain with no forks. Additionally, with the proposed proof-of-refundable-tax (PoRT) consensus algorithm,…
Decentralization is widely recognized as a crucial characteristic of blockchains that enables them to resist malicious attacks such as the 51% attack and the takeover attack. Prior research has primarily examined decentralization in…
Blockchain is an essentially distributed database recording all transactions or digital events among participating parties. Each transaction in the records is approved and verified by consensus of the participants in the system that…
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…
Researchers have discovered a series of theoretical attacks against Bitcoin's Nakamoto consensus; the most damaging ones are selfish mining, double-spending, and consistency delay attacks. These attacks have one common cause: block…
Blockchain applications often rely on lightweight clients to access and verify on-chain data efficiently without the need to run a resource-intensive full node. These light clients must maintain robust security to protect the blockchain's…
Sanctioning blockchain addresses has become a common regulatory response to malicious activities. However, enforcement on permissionless blockchains remains challenging due to complex transaction flows and sophisticated fund-obfuscation…
Blockchain solutions typically assume a synchronous network to ensure consistency and achieve consensus. In contrast, offline transaction systems aim to enable users to agree on and execute transactions without assuming bounded…
The blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain record the amount of work W that went into creating them through proofs of work. When honest parties control a majority of the work, consensus is achieved by picking the chain with the highest recorded…
Mining processes of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are currently incentivized with voluntary transaction fees and fixed block rewards which will halve gradually to zero. In the setting where optional and arbitrary transaction fee…
In this paper we revisit the mining strategies in proof of work based cryptocurrencies and propose two strategies, we call smart and smarter mining, that in many cases strictly dominate honest mining. In contrast to other known attacks,…
Distributed ledgers are common in the industry. Some of them can use blockchains as their underlying infrastructure. A blockchain requires participants to agree on its contents. This can be achieved via a consensus protocol, and several BFT…
Attacks targeting several millions of non-internet based application users are on the rise. These applications such as SMS and USSD typically do not benefit from existing multi-factor authentication methods due to the nature of their…
Since its inception, the blockchain technology has shown promising application prospects. From the initial cryptocurrency to the current smart contract, blockchain has been applied to many fields. Although there are some studies on the…
Blockchain protocols are inherently limited in transaction throughput and latency. Recent efforts to address performance and scale blockchains have focused on off-chain payment channels. While such channels can achieve low latency and high…
A major challenge in blockchain sharding protocols is that more than 95% transactions are cross-shard. Not only those cross-shard transactions degrade the system throughput but also double the confirmation time, and exhaust an already…
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, use an approach called "metering" to assign a cost to smart contract execution, an approach which is designed to incentivise miners to operate the network and protect it against DoS attacks. In the…
Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute payment transactions securely, but their performance is limited by the need for global consensus. Payment networks overcome this limitation through off-chain transactions. Instead of writing…