Related papers: A first look at browser-based Cryptojacking
The number of blockchain users has tremendously grown in recent years. As an unintended consequence, e-crime transactions on blockchains has been on the rise. Consequently, public blockchains have become a hotbed of research for developing…
What happens to mining when the Bitcoin price changes, when there are mining supply shocks, the price of energy changes, or hardware technology evolves? We give precise answers based on the technical forces and incentives in the system. We…
In the realm of cybersecurity, phishing stands as a prevalent cyber attack, where attackers employ various tactics to deceive users into gathering their sensitive information, potentially leading to identity theft or financial gain.…
The resource-consuming mining of blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol bears the risk of ruin, namely when the operational costs for the mining exceed the received rewards. In this paper we investigate to…
Background: Cyber offences, such as hacking, malware creation and distribution, and online fraud, present a substantial threat to organizations attempting to safeguard their data and information. By understanding the evolving…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
The energy sustainability of blockchains, whose consensus protocol rests on the Proof-of-Work, nourishes a heated debate. The underlying issue lies in a highly energy-consuming process, defined as mining, required to validate crypto-asset…
Traditionally, "Cryptography" is a benediction to information processing and communications, it helps people to store information securely and the private communications over long distances. Cryptovirology is the study of applications of…
Since the creation of Bitcoin, transaction tracking is one of the prominent means for following the movement of Bitcoins involved in illegal activities. Although every Bitcoin transaction is recorded in the blockchain database, which is…
Research has shown that cryptographic APIs are hard to use. Consequently, developers resort to using code examples available in online information sources that are often not secure. We have developed a web platform, named CryptoExplorer,…
Blockchain, as a distributed ledger technology, becomes increasingly popular, especially for enabling valuable cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. However, the blockchain software systems inevitably have many bugs. Although bugs in smart…
With the rapid increase of threats on the Internet, people are continuously seeking privacy and anonymity. Services such as Bitcoin and Tor were introduced to provide anonymity for online transactions and Web browsing. Due to its…
Cryptocurrency miners have great latitude in deciding which transactions they accept, including their own, and the order in which they accept them. Ethereum miners in particular use this flexibility to collect MEV-Miner Extractable Value-by…
Quantum computation represents a threat to many cryptographic protocols in operation today. It has been estimated that by 2035, there will exist a quantum computer capable of breaking the vital cryptographic scheme RSA2048. Blockchain…
Different types of malicious activities have been flagged in multiple permissionless blockchains such as bitcoin, Ethereum etc. While some malicious activities exploit vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of the blockchain, some target its…
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…
The rise of Web3 and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has enabled borderless access to financial services empowered by smart contracts and blockchain technology. However, the ecosystem's trustless, permissionless, and borderless nature presents…
We calculate the probability of success of block-hiding mining strategies in Bitcoin-like networks. These strategies involve building a secret branch of the block-tree and publishing it opportunistically, aiming to replace the top of the…
The targeted advertising is based on preference profiles inferred via relationships among individuals, their monitored responses to previous advertising and temporal activity over the Internet, which has raised critical privacy concerns. In…
With the recent growth in the number of malicious activities on the internet, cybersecurity research has seen a boost in the past few years. However, as certain variants of malware can provide highly lucrative opportunities for bad actors,…