Related papers: Incentives in Ethereum's Hybrid Casper Protocol
Smart grids leverage the data collected from smart meters to make important operational decisions. However, they are vulnerable to False Data Injection (FDI) attacks in which an attacker manipulates meter data to disrupt the grid…
This paper presents a novel adversary model specifically tailored to distributed systems, aiming to assess the security of blockchain networks. Building upon concepts such as adversarial assumptions, goals, and capabilities, our proposed…
In blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, users compete in a transaction fee auction to get their transactions confirmed in the next block. A line of recent works set forth the desiderata for a "dream" transaction fee mechanism (TFM),…
Motivated by proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains such as Ethereum, two key desiderata have recently been studied for Byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) state-machine replication (SMR) consensus protocols: Finality means that the protocol retains…
A soft control of the network activity through varying reward in a proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency is reported. Rewards are the necessity to incent the contributors activities (i.e., mining) in order to maintain the PoW network. Contrary…
Callbacks are essential in many programming environments, but drastically complicate program understanding and reasoning because they allow to mutate object's local states by external objects in unexpected fashions, thus breaking…
Smart contracts are crucial elements of decentralized technologies, but they face significant obstacles to trustworthiness due to security bugs and trapdoors. To address the core issue, we propose a technology that enables programmers to…
In order to have transactions executed and recorded on blockchains such as the Ethereum Mainnet, fees expressed in crypto-currency units of the blockchain must be paid. One can buy crypto-currency called Ether of the Ethereum blockchain…
Most concurrent blockchain systems rely heavily on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms for decentralized consensus and security assurance. However, the substantial energy expenditure stemming from computationally…
Current blockchain protocols (e.g., Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake) secure the ledger yet cannot measure validator trustworthiness, allowing subtle misconduct that is especially damaging in decentralized-finance (DeFi) settings. We…
Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security…
In the paper, we present designs for multiple blockchain consensus primitives and a novel blockchain system, all based on the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX-enabled CPUs. First, we show how using TEEs for…
Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies are gaining unprecedented popularity and understanding. Meanwhile, Ethereum is gaining a significant popularity in the blockchain community, mainly due to the fact that it is designed in a way that enables…
Blockchain-based consensus protocols present the opportunity to develop new protocols, due to their novel requirements of open participation and explicit incentivization of participants. To address the first requirement, it is necessary to…
This master thesis deals with Blockchain Technology in mobile turn based peer to peer games. First, it investigates the capabilities of Blockchain Technology to be used for gaming applications. In this regard, among others,…
The recent advent of various forms of Federated Knowledge Distillation (FD) paves the way for a new generation of robust and communication-efficient Federated Learning (FL), where mere soft-labels are aggregated, rather than whole gradients…
Liquid staking has become the largest category of decentralized finance protocols in terms of total value locked. However, few studies exist on its implementation designs or underlying risks. The liquid staking protocols allow for earning…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies secure a decentralized consensus protocol by incentives. The protocol participants, called miners, generate (mine) a series of blocks, each containing monetary transactions created by system users. As…
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data, preserving privacy while harnessing distributed datasets. However, traditional FL systems often rely on centralized aggregating mechanisms, introducing…
The paper examines decentralized cryptocurrency protocols that are based on the use of internal tokens as identity tools. An analysis of security problems with popular Proof-of-stake consensus protocols is provided. A new protocol,…