Related papers: Broken Metre: Attacking Resource Metering in EVM
Smart contracts are self-executing programs that run on blockchains (e.g., Ethereum). 680 million US dollars worth of digital assets controlled by smart contracts have been hacked or stolen due to various security vulnerabilities in 2021.…
In proof-of-work based blockchains such as Ethereum, verification of blocks is an integral part of establishing consensus across nodes. However, in Ethereum, miners do not receive a reward for verifying. This implies that miners face the…
Gas is a measurement unit of the computational effort that it will take to execute every single operation that takes part in the Ethereum blockchain platform. Each instruction executed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) has an associated…
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…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
We hypothesize that peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay network nodes can be attractive to attackers due to their visibility, sustained uptime, and resource potential. Towards validating this hypothesis, we investigate the state of active…
We investigate a family of bugs in blockchain-based smart contracts, which we call event-ordering (or EO) bugs. These bugs are intimately related to the dynamic ordering of contract events, i.e., calls of its functions on the blockchain,…
Symbolic analysis of security exploits in smart contracts has demonstrated to be valuable for analyzing predefined vulnerability properties. While some symbolic tools perform complex analysis steps, they require a predetermined invocation…
Block space on the blockchain is scarce and must be allocated efficiently through block building. However, Ethereum's current block-building ecosystem, MEV-Boost, has become highly centralized due to integration, which distorts competition,…
Turing completeness has made Ethereum smart contracts attractive to blockchain developers and attackers alike. To increase code security, many tools can now spot most known vulnerabilities$-$at the cost of production efficiency. Recent…
Ethereum has emerged as a leading platform for decentralized applications (dApps) due to its robust smart contract capabilities. One of the critical issues in the Ethereum ecosystem is Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), a concept that has…
Smart contracts are Turing-complete programs running on the blockchain. They are immutable and cannot be modified, even when bugs are detected. Therefore, ensuring smart contracts are bug-free and well-designed before deploying them to the…
Smart contracts---stateful executable objects hosted on blockchains like Ethereum---carry billions of dollars worth of coins and cannot be updated once deployed. We present a new systematic characterization of a class of trace…
In this paper, we present ChaosETH, a chaos engineering approach for resilience assessment of Ethereum blockchain clients. ChaosETH operates in the following manner: First, it monitors Ethereum clients to determine their normal behavior.…
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…
Blockchain technology is widely used in various fields due to its ability to provide decentralization and trustless security. This is a fundamental understanding held by many advocates, but it is misunderstood, leading participants to fail…
We study selfish mining in Ethereum. The problem is combinatorially more complex than in Bitcoin because of major differences in the reward system and a different difficulty adjustment formula. Equivalent strategies in Bitcoin do have…
The growing computational demand for deep neural networks ( DNNs) has raised concerns about their energy consumption and carbon footprint, particularly as the size and complexity of the models continue to increase. To address these…
Modern blockchains, such as Ethereum, enable the execution of so-called smart contracts - programs that are executed across a decentralised network of nodes. As smart contracts become more popular and carry more value, they become more of…
In the realm of smart contract security, transaction malice detection has been able to leverage properties of transaction traces to identify hacks with high accuracy. However, these methods cannot be applied in real-time to revert malicious…