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Cryptocurrencies are considered relevant assets and they are currently used as an investment or to carry out transactions. However, specific characteristics commonly associated with the cryptocurrencies such as irreversibility,…
Ethereum smart contracts have recently drawn a considerable amount of attention from the media, the financial industry and academia. With the increase in popularity, malicious users found new opportunities to profit by deceiving newcomers.…
The peer-to-peer (P2P) network of blockchain used to transport its transactions and blocks has a high impact on the efficiency and security of the system. The P2P network topologies of popular blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum,…
Smart contracts are self-executing programs that run on blockchains (e.g., Ethereum). 680 million US dollars worth of digital assets controlled by smart contracts have been hacked or stolen due to various security vulnerabilities in 2021.…
Non-fungible tokens or NFTs are the digital assets on a blockchain. NFTs are unique and they cannot be divided like cryptocurrencies. NFTs could store digital ownership of an artwork or collections or can be fan tokens or tickets for clubs.…
Many classical blockchains are known to have an embarrassingly low transaction throughput, down to Bitcoin's notorious seven transactions per second limit.Various proposals and implementations for increasing throughput emerged in the first…
Ethereum prospered the inception of a plethora of smart contract applications, ranging from gambling games to decentralized finance. However, Ethereum is also considered a highly adversarial environment, where vulnerable smart contracts…
Emerging blockchain and cryptocurrency-based technologies are redefining the way we conduct business in cyberspace. Today, a myriad of blockchain and cryptocurrency systems, applications, and technologies are widely available to companies,…
The Metaverse, an immersive virtual world, has emerged as a shared space where people engage in various activities ranging from social interactions to commerce. Cryptocurrencies [3] and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) [6] play pivotal roles…
Job-based smishing scams, where victims are recruited under the guise of remote job opportunities, represent a rapidly growing and understudied threat within the broader landscape of online fraud. In this paper, we present Anansi, the first…
In this paper, we describe a new type of online fraud, referred to as 'eWhoring' by offenders. This crime script analysis provides an overview of the 'eWhoring' business model, drawing on more than 6,500 posts crawled from an online…
Since it takes time and effort to put a new product or service on the market, one would like to predict whether it will be a success. In general this is not possible, but it is possible to follow best practices in order to maximise the…
As the most popular blockchain that supports smart contracts, there are already more than 296 thousand kinds of cryptocurrencies built on Ethereum. However, not all cryptocurrencies can be controlled by users. For example, some money is…
Smart contract technology is reshaping conventional industry and business processes. Being embedded in blockchains, smart contracts enable the contractual terms of an agreement to be enforced automatically without the intervention of a…
As cryptocurrency evolved, new financial instruments, such as lending and borrowing protocols, currency exchanges, fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFT), staking and mining protocols have emerged. A financial ecosystem built on top of a…
Social engineering scams (SES) has been existed since the adoption of the telecommunications by humankind. An earlier version of the scams include leveraging premium phone service to charge the consumers and service providers but not…
The blockchain technology is believed by many to be a game changer in many application domains, especially financial applications. While the first generation of blockchain technology (i.e., Blockchain 1.0) is almost exclusively used for…
The proxy design pattern allows Ethereum smart contracts to be simultaneously immutable and upgradeable, in which an original contract is split into a proxy contract containing the data storage and a logic contract containing the…
Permissionless blockchains allow the execution of arbitrary programs (called smart contracts), enabling mutually untrusted entities to interact without relying on trusted third parties. Despite their potential, repeated security concerns…
Smart contracts are dependent on oracle systems for their adoption and usability. We perform an empirical study of oracle systems' usage trends and adoption metrics to provide better insight into the health of the smart contract ecosystem.…