Related papers: Hardening Stratum, the Bitcoin Pool Mining Protoco…
Blockchain has received tremendous attention as a secure, distributed, and anonymous framework for the Internet of Things (IoT). As a distributed system, blockchain trades off scalability for distribution, which limits the technologys…
We present SmartShards: a new sharding algorithm for improving Byzantine tolerance and churn resistance in blockchains. Our algorithm places a peer in multiple shards to create an overlap. This simplifies cross-shard communication and shard…
In this work, we reexamine the vulnerability of Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) to bribing attacks, where an adversary incentivizes blockchain miners to deliberately ignore a specific transaction to undermine the punishment mechanism of…
Cryptocurrency has seen an explosive growth in recent years, thanks to the evolvement of blockchain technology and its economic ecosystem. Besides Bitcoin, thousands of cryptocurrencies have been distributed on blockchains, while hundreds…
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment system proposed by Nakamoto in 2008. Properties of the bitcoin backbone protocol have been investigated in some depth: the blockchain growth property quantifies the number of blocks added to the blockchain…
Most public blockchain protocols, including the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, do not formally specify the order in which miners should select transactions from the pool of pending (or uncommitted) transactions for inclusion in…
Smart contracts are cryptographic protocols that are enforced without a judiciary. Smart contracts are used occasionally in Bitcoin and are prevalent in Ethereum. Public quantum money improves upon cash we use today, yet the current…
In this paper, we provide a novel dynamic decision method of blockchain selfish mining by applying the sensitivity-based optimization theory. Our aim is to find the optimal dynamic blockchain-pegged policy of the dishonest mining pool. To…
We present Union, a trust-minimized bridge protocol that enables secure transfer of BTC between Bitcoin and a secondary blockchain. The growing ecosystem of blockchain systems built around Bitcoin has created a pressing need for secure and…
Cryptocurrency achieves distributed consensus using proof of work (PoW). Prior research in blockchain security identified financially incentivized attacks based on withholding blocks which have the attacker compromise a victim pool and pose…
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…
While showing great promise, Bitcoin requires users to wait tens of minutes for transactions to commit, and even then, offering only probabilistic guarantees. This paper introduces ByzCoin, a novel Byzantine consensus protocol that…
The spectacular success of Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology in recent years has provided enough evidence that a widespread adoption of a common cryptocurrency system is not merely a distant vision, but a scenario that might come true in…
Existing blockchain systems scale poorly because of their distributed consensus protocols. Current attempts at improving blockchain scalability are limited to cryptocurrency. Scaling blockchain systems under general workloads (i.e.,…
The increasing adoption of cryptocurrencies has significantly amplified the resource requirements for operating full nodes, creating substantial barriers to entry. Unlike miners, who are financially incentivized through block rewards and…
Despite the popularity of Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) because of their use in wide areas of applications such as payment channels, atomic swaps, etc, their use in exchange is still questionable. This is because of its incentive…
We study the incentives behind double-spend attacks on Nakamoto-style Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies. In these systems, miners are allowed to choose which transactions to reference with their block, and a common strategy for selecting…
This work presents ContractChecker, a Blockchain-based security protocol for verifying the storage consistency between the mutually distrusting cloud provider and clients. Unlike existing protocols, the ContractChecker uniquely delegates…
Selfish Mining is strategic rule-breaking to maximize rewards in proof-of-work protocols [3] and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the preferred tool for finding optimal strategies in Bitcoin [4, 10] and similar linear chain protocols…
Mining fairness in blockchain refers to equality between the computational resources invested in mining and the block rewards received. There exists a dilemma wherein increasing the transaction processing capacity of a blockchain…