Related papers: The Balance Attack Against Proof-Of-Work Blockchai…
Recently, two attacks were presented against Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum: one where short-range reorganizations of the underlying consensus chain are used to increase individual validators' profits and delay consensus decisions, and one…
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…
We present and validate a novel mathematical model of the blockchain mining process and use it to conduct an economic evaluation of the double-spend attack, which is fundamental to all blockchain systems. Our analysis focuses on the value…
With the promise of greater decentralization and sustainability, Ethereum transitioned from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The new consensus protocol introduces novel vulnerabilities that warrant…
Authorization is challenging in distributed systems that cannot rely on the identification of nodes. Proof-of-work offers an alternative gate-keeping mechanism, but its probabilistic nature is incompatible with conventional security…
Blockchain protocols incentivize participation through monetary rewards, assuming rational actors behave honestly to maximize their gains. However, attackers may attempt to harm others even at personal cost. These denial of profit attacks…
In the area of blockchain, numerous methods have been proposed for suppressing intentional forks by attackers more effectively than the random rule. However, all of them, except for the random rule, require major updates, rely on a trusted…
Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on blockchain…
We study efficiency in a proof-of-work blockchain with non-zero latencies, focusing in particular on the (inequality in) individual miners' efficiencies. Prior work attributed differences in miners' efficiencies mostly to attacks, but we…
Proof-of-Work mining is intended to provide blockchains with robustness against double-spend attacks. However, an economic analysis that follows from Budish (2018), which considers free entry conditions together with the ability to rent…
We analyze how secure a block is after the block becomes $k$-deep, i.e., security-latency, for Nakamoto consensus under an exponential network delay model. We provide the fault tolerance and extensive bounds on safety violation…
Proof of work blockchain protocols using multiple hash types are considered. It is proven that the security region of such a protocol cannot be the AND of a 51\% attack on all the hash types. Nevertheless, a protocol called Merged Bitcoin…
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…
Banking as an essential service can be hard to access in remote, rural regions where the network connectivity is intermittent. Although micro-banking has been made possible by SMS or USSD messages in some places, their security flaws and…
In this paper, we explore vulnerabilities and countermeasures of the recently proposed blockchain consensus based on proof-of-authority. The proof-of-work blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, have been shown both theoretically and…
Many prominent smart-contract applications such as payment channels, auctions, and voting systems often involve a mechanism in which some party must respond to a challenge or appeal some action within a fixed time limit. This pattern 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…
A proof of the security of the Bitcoin protocol is made rigorous, and simplified in certain parts. A computational model in which an adversary can delay transmission of blocks by time $\Delta$ is considered. The protocol is generalized to…
Ethereum has undergone a recent change called \textit{the Merge}, which made Ethereum a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, shifting closer to BFT consensus. Ethereum, which wished to keep the best of the two protocol designs (BFT and…
Blockchain technology has developed significantly over the last decade. One of the reasons for this is its sustainability architecture, which does not allow modification of the history of committed transactions. That means that developers…