Related papers: Hardening Stratum, the Bitcoin Pool Mining Protoco…
Bitcoin is a decentralized, pseudonymous cryptocurrency that is one of the most used digital assets to date. Its unregulated nature and inherent anonymity of users have led to a dramatic increase in its use for illicit activities. This…
Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed ledger technology that ensures transparency, security, and immutability through cryptographic techniques. However, advancements in quantum computing threaten the security of classical cryptographic…
A smart grid is an important application in Industry 4.0 with a lot of new technologies and equipment working together. Hence, sensitive data stored in the smart grid is vulnerable to malicious modification and theft. This paper proposes a…
The recent proliferation of blockchain-based decentralized applications (DApp) has catalyzed transformative advancements in distributed systems, with extensive deployments observed across financial, entertainment, media, and cybersecurity…
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…
Seminal work of Eyal and Sirer (2014) establishes that a strategic Bitcoin miner may strictly profit by deviating from the intended Bitcoin protocol, using a strategy now termed *selfish mining*. More specifically, any miner with $>1/3$ of…
Bitcoin blockchain uses hash-based Proof-of-Work (PoW) that prevents unwanted participants from hogging the network resources. Anyone entering the mining game has to prove that they have expended a specific amount of computational power.…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular consensus protocol used by Bitcoin since its inception. PoW has the well-known flaw of assigning all the reward to the single miner (or pool) that inserts the new block. This has the consequence of making…
Turing completeness has made Ethereum smart contracts attractive to blockchain developers and attackers alike. To increase code security, many tools can now spot most known vulnerabilities$-$at the cost of production efficiency. Recent…
Providing reliable and surreptitious communications is difficult in the presence of adaptive and resourceful state level censors. In this paper we introduce Tithonus, a framework that builds on the Bitcoin blockchain and network to provide…
The widespread adoption of blockchain technology has amplified the spectrum of potential threats to its integrity and security. The ongoing quest to exploit vulnerabilities emphasizes how critical it is to expand on current research…
It has been known for some time that the Nakamoto consensus as implemented in the Bitcoin protocol is not totally aligned with the individual interests of the participants. More precisely, it has been shown that block withholding mining…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography which has recently gained excessive popularity. Scientific research on bitcoin is less abundant. A paper at Financial Cryptography 2012…
The rigorous security model of Bitcoin's UTXO architecture often comes at the cost of developer usability, forcing a reliance on manual stack manipulation that leads to critical financial vulnerabilities like signature malleability,…
Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency that serves as an alternative to existing transaction systems based on an external central authority for security. Although Bitcoin has many desirable properties, one of its fundamental…
Selfish mining is a well known vulnerability in blockchains exploited by miners to steal block rewards. In this paper, we explore a new form of selfish mining attack that guarantees high rewards with low cost. We show the feasibility of…
Proof of work cryptocurrencies began with the promise of a more egalitarian future with a decentralized monetary system with no powerful entities in charge. While this vision is far from realized, these cryptocurrencies are still touted to…
Currently there exist many blockchains with weak trust guarantees, limiting applications and participation. Existing solutions to boost the trust using a stronger blockchain, e.g., via checkpointing, requires the weaker blockchain to give…
Blockchains are intended to be immutable, so an attacker who is able to delete transactions through a chain reorganization (a malicious reorg) can perform a profitable double-spend attack. We study the rate at which an attacker can execute…
We present TRAIL: an algorithm that uses a novel consensus procedure to tolerate failed or malicious shards within a blockchain-based cryptocurrency. Our algorithm takes a new approach of selecting validator shards for each transaction from…