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Traffic monetization is a crucial component of running most for-profit online businesses. One of its latest incarnations is cryptocurrency mining, where a website instructs the visitor's browser to participate in building a cryptocurrency…
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…
We review the so called selfish mining strategy in the Bitcoin network and compare its profitability to honest mining.We build a rigorous profitability model for repetition games. The time analysis of the attack has been ignored in the…
The decentralization, redundancy, and pseudo-anonymity features have made permission-less public blockchain platforms attractive for adoption as technology platforms for cryptocurrencies. However, such adoption has enabled cybercriminals to…
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…
We describe and analyze perishing mining, a novel block-withholding mining strategy that lures profit-driven miners away from doing useful work on the public chain by releasing block headers from a privately maintained chain. We then…
Fileless malware and cryptojacking attacks have appeared independently as the new alarming threats in 2017. After 2020, fileless attacks have been devastating for victim organizations with low-observable characteristics. Also, the amount of…
Bitcoin is firmly becoming a mainstream asset in our global society. Its highly volatile nature has traders and speculators flooding into the market to take advantage of its significant price swings in the hope of making money. This work…
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…
The first six months of 2018 saw cryptocurrency thefts of $761 million, and the technology is also the latest and greatest tool for money laundering. This increase in crime has caused both researchers and law enforcement to look for ways to…
We present in this work an economic analysis of ransomware, with relevant data from Cryptolocker, CryptoWall, TeslaCrypt and other major strands. We include a detailed study of the impact that different price discrimination strategies can…
The key cryptographic protocols used to secure the internet and financial transactions of today are all susceptible to attack by the development of a sufficiently large quantum computer. One particular area at risk are cryptocurrencies, a…
This paper contextualises the common queries of "why is crypto crashing?" and "why is crypto down?", the research transcends beyond the frequent market fluctuations to unravel how cryptocurrencies fundamentally work and the step-by-step…
Bribery is a perilous issue in the real world, especially in an economical aspect. This fraudulence is unavoidable, and more importantly, it is more difficult to trace in case smart contracts are utilized for bribing on a distributed public…
Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency that records alltransactions in a distributed append-only public ledger calledblockchain. The security of Bitcoin heavily relies on the incentive-compatible proof-of-work (PoW) based distributed consensus…
Cryptocurrencies are considered relevant assets and they are currently used as an investment or to carry out transactions. However, specific characteristics commonly associated with the cryptocurrencies such as irreversibility,…
Ransomware attacks continue to wreak havoc across the globe, with public reports of total ransomware payments topping billions of dollars annually. While the use of cryptocurrency presents an avenue to understand the tactics of ransomware…
Cryptojacking is the permissionless use of a target device to covertly mine cryptocurrencies. With cryptojacking, attackers use malicious JavaScript codes to force web browsers into solving proof-of-work puzzles, thus making money by…
Bitcoin-NG is an extensible blockchain protocol based on the same trust model as Bitcoin. It divides each epoch into one Key-Block and multiple Micro-Blocks, effectively improving transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG adopts a special…
In modern times, the cryptocurrency market is one of the world's most rapidly rising financial markets. The cryptocurrency market is regarded to be more volatile and illiquid than traditional markets such as equities, foreign exchange, and…