Related papers: A first look at browser-based Cryptojacking
Many of the recent works on the profitability of rogue mining strategies hinge on a parameter called $\gamma$ that measures the proportion of the honest network attracted by the attacker to mine on top of his fork. These works, see…
We are often faced with the non-trivial task of designing incentive mechanisms in the era of Web3. As history has shown, many Web3 services failed mostly due to the lack of a rigorous incentive mechanism design based on token economics.…
Cryptocurrencies typically aim at preserving the privacy of their users. Different cryptocurrencies preserve privacy at various levels, some of them requiring users to rely on strategies to raise the privacy level to their needs. Among…
Although Bitcoin was intended to be a decentralized digital currency, in practice, mining power is quite concentrated. This fact is a persistent source of concern for the Bitcoin community. We provide an explanation using a simple model to…
In many blockchains, e.g., Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), the primary representation used for wallet addresses is a hardly memorable 40-digit hexadecimal string. As a result, users often select addresses from their recent transaction…
A blockchain, such as Bitcoin, is an append-only, secure, transparent, distributed ledger. A fair blockchain is expected to have healthy metrics; high honest mining power, low processing latency, i.e., low wait times for transactions and…
Cryptocurrencies have garnered a lot of attention by governments and internet enthusiasts over the past three years. These currencies are celebrated for their security and speedy transactions in a modern era of digital commerce. Bitcoin was…
Proof-of-work computation used in cryptocurrencies has witnessed significant growth in the U.S. and many other regions around the world. One of the most significant bottlenecks for the scalable deployment of such computation is its energy…
With the advance of technology, Criminal Justice agencies are being confronted with an increased need to investigate crimes perpetuated partially or entirely over the Internet. These types of crime are known as cybercrimes. In order to…
Cryptocurrency has been subject to illicit activities probably more often than traditional financial assets due to the pseudo-anonymous nature of its transacting entities. An ideal detection model is expected to achieve all three critical…
ASIC cryptocurrency miners are a core component of blockchain infrastructures, directly converting computation and energy into monetary value. Despite their economic importance, their security is rarely evaluated in a structured manner. In…
Blockchain technologies have overturned the digital finance industry by introducing a decentralized pseudonymous means of monetary transfer. The pseudonymous nature introduced privacy concerns, enabling various deanonymization techniques,…
We propose a mean field game model to study the question of how centralization of reward and computational power occur in Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies. Miners compete against each other for mining rewards by increasing their computational…
Payment channel networks, and the Lightning Network in particular, seem to offer a solution to the lack of scalability and privacy offered by Bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Previous research has focused on the…
Recently, blockchain technology has become a topic in the spotlight but also a hotbed of various cybercrimes. Among them, phishing scams on blockchain have been found making a notable amount of money, thus emerging as a serious threat to…
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…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency has received much attention recently. In the network of Bitcoin, transactions are recorded in a ledger. In this network, the process of recording transactions depends on some nodes called miners that execute a…
Mining attacks aim to gain an unfair share of extra rewards in the blockchain mining. Selfish mining can preserve discovered blocks and strategically release them, wasting honest miners' computing resources and getting higher profits.…
Bitcoin is a digital currency designed to rely on a decentralized, trustless network of anonymous agents. Using a pseudonymous-address-linking procedure that achieves >99% sensitivity and >99% specificity, we reveal that between launch…
We analyze bribing attacks in Proof-of-Stake distributed ledgers from a game theoretic perspective. In bribing attacks, an adversary offers participants a reward in exchange for instructing them how to behave, with the goal of attacking the…