Related papers: Selfish Mining in Ethereum
In permissionless blockchains, transaction issuers include a fee to incentivize miners to include their transactions. To accurately estimate this prioritization fee for a transaction, transaction issuers (or blockchain participants, more…
With the popularity of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), NFTs have become a new target of phishing attacks, posing a significant threat to the NFT trading ecosystem. There has been growing anecdotal evidence that new means of NFT phishing attacks…
We model and analyze blockchain miners who seek to maximize the compound return of their mining businesses. The analysis of the optimal strategies finds a new equilibrium point among the miners and the mining pools, which predicts the…
Despite the tremendous interest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum today, many aspects of the underlying consensus protocols are poorly understood. Therefore, the search for protocols that improve either throughput or security…
We compute and compare profitabilities of stubborn mining strategies that are variations of selfish mining. These are deviant mining strategies violating Bitcoin's network protocol rules. We apply the foundational set-up from our previous…
Many Ethereum smart contracts rely on block attributes such as block.timestamp or blockhash to generate random numbers for applications like lotteries and games. However, these values are predictable and miner-manipulable, creating the Bad…
Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on 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…
Eclipse attacks isolate blockchain nodes by monopolizing their peer-to-peer connections. The attacks were extensively studied in Bitcoin (SP'15, SP'20, CCS'21, SP'23) and Monero (NDSS'25), but their practicality against Ethereum nodes…
Blockchain technologies are taking the world by storm. Public blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, enable secure peer-to-peer applications like crypto-currency or smart contracts. Their security and performance are well studied. This…
Abrupt changes in the miner hash rate applied to a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain can adversely affect user experience and security. Because different PoW blockchains often share hashing algorithms, miners face a complex choice in deciding…
Miners play a key role in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin: they invest substantial computational resources in processing transactions and minting new currency units. It is well known that an attacker controlling more than half of the…
Decentralization has been widely acknowledged as a core virtue of blockchains. However, in the past, there have been few measurement studies on measuring and comparing the actual level of decentralization between existing blockchains using…
Ethereum has undergone a recent change called \textit{the Merge}, which made Ethereum a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, shifting closer to BFT consensus. Ethereum, which wished to keep the best of the two protocol designs (BFT and…
Maximal extractable value (MEV) in which block proposers unethically gain profits by manipulating the order in which transactions are included within a block, is a key challenge facing blockchains such as Ethereum today. Left unchecked, MEV…
First, a big data analysis of the transactions and smart contracts made on the Ethereum blockchain is performed, revealing interesting trends in motion. Next, these trends are compared with the public's interest in Ether and Bitcoin,…
Blockchain protocols incentivize participation through monetary rewards, assuming rational actors behave honestly to maximize their gains. However, attackers may attempt to harm others even at personal cost. These denial of profit attacks…
Blockchain based systems allow various kinds of financial transactions to be executed in a decentralized manner. However, these systems often rely on a trusted third party (oracle) to get correct information about the real-world events,…
In this study, we examine the behavior and profitability of modern malware that mines cryptocurrency. Unlike previous studies, we look at the cryptocurrency market as a whole, rather than just Bitcoin. We not only consider PCs, but also…
The long-term success of cryptocurrencies largely depends on the incentive compatibility provided to the validators. Bribery attacks, facilitated trustlessly via smart contracts, threaten this foundation. This work introduces, implements,…