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We provide a game-theoretic analysis of the problem of front-running attacks. We use it to distinguish attacks from legitimate competition among honest users for having their transactions included earlier in the block. We also use it to…
As smart contract platforms autonomously manage billions of dollars of capital, quantifying the portfolio risk that investors engender in these systems is increasingly important. Recent work illustrates that Proof of Stake (PoS) is…
Selfish mining is strategic rule-breaking to maximize rewards in proof-of-work protocols. Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the preferred tool for finding optimal strategies in Bitcoin and similar linear chain protocols. Protocols…
In the area of blockchain, numerous methods have been proposed for suppressing intentional forks by attackers more effectively than the random rule. However, all of them, except for the random rule, require major updates, rely on a trusted…
Autonomous systems are increasingly expected to operate in the presence of adversaries, though adversaries may infer sensitive information simply by observing a system. Therefore, present a deceptive sequential decision-making framework…
Collaborative learning techniques have the potential to enable training machine learning models that are superior to models trained on a single entity's data. However, in many cases, potential participants in such collaborative schemes are…
Mining blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol is well-known to be resource-consuming. A miner bears the operational cost, mainly electricity consumption and IT gear, of mining, and is compensated by a…
The purpose of a consensus protocol is to keep a distributed network of nodes "in sync," even in the presence of an unpredictable communication network and adversarial behavior by some of the participating nodes. In the permissionless…
With the increasing adoption of decentralized information systems based on a variety of permissionless blockchain networks, the choice of consensus mechanism is at the core of many controversial discussions. Ethereum's recent transition…
Distributed protocols such as Paxos play an important role in many computer systems. Therefore, a bug in a distributed protocol may have tremendous effects. Accordingly, a lot of effort has been invested in verifying such protocols.…
Proof-of-Learning (PoL) proposes that a model owner logs training checkpoints to establish a proof of having expended the computation necessary for training. The authors of PoL forego cryptographic approaches and trade rigorous security…
We compare the total capital efficiency of secure restaking and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocols. First, we consider the sufficient condition for the restaking graph to be secure. The condition implies that it is always possible to transform…
Proof-of-Work blockchain, despite its numerous benefits, is still not an entirely secure technology due to the existence of Selfish Mining (SM) strategies that can disrupt the system and its mining economy. While the effect of SM has been…
This paper presents a reformulation in topos logic of a safety result arising in an abstract presentation of blockchain consensus protocols. That is, in a high-level template for "correct-by-construction" consensus protocols, it is shown…
Current blockchain consensus protocols -- notably, Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) -- deliver global agreement but exhibit structural constraints. PoW anchors security in heavy computation, inflating energy use and imposing…
Byzantine fault tolerant protocols enable state replication in the presence of crashed, malfunctioning, or actively malicious processes. Designing such protocols without the assistance of verification tools, however, is remarkably…
We present Large-scale Known-committee Stake-based Agreement (LaKSA), a chain-based Proof-of-Stake protocol that is dedicated, but not limited, to cryptocurrencies. LaKSA minimizes interactions between nodes through lightweight committee…
Authorization is challenging in distributed systems that cannot rely on the identification of nodes. Proof-of-work offers an alternative gate-keeping mechanism, but its probabilistic nature is incompatible with conventional security…
We propose a new Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol constructed with a verifiable random function (VRF) and a verifiable delay function (VDF) that has the following properties: a) all addresses with positive stake can participate; b) is fair…
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocols often face a trade-off between performance and security. Protocols that pre-elect leaders for subsequent rounds are vulnerable to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, which can disrupt the network and…