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Multi-party data management and blockchain systems require data sharing among participants. To provide resilient and consistent data sharing, transactions engines rely on Byzantine FaultTolerant consensus (BFT), which enables operations…
Most cryptocurrencies rely on Proof-of-Work (PoW) "mining" for resistance to Sybil and double-spending attacks, as well as a mechanism for currency issuance. Hashcash PoW has successfully secured the Bitcoin network since its inception,…
This paper presents an empirical evaluation of the Proof of Team Sprint (PoTS) consensus algorithm, focusing on reward fairness, energy efficiency, system stability, and scalability. We conducted large-scale simulations comparing PoTS with…
Stablecoins have emerged as a rapidly growing digital payment instrument, raising the question of whether blockchain-based settlement can function as a substitute for incumbent card networks in retail payments. This Systematization of…
Proof of Work (PoW) blockchains burn a lot of energy. Proof-of-work algorithms are expensive by design and often only serve to compute blockchains. In some sense, carbon-based and non-carbon based regional electric power is fungible. So the…
Mobile service providers (MSPs) are particularly vulnerable to roaming frauds, especially ones that exploit the long delay in the data exchange process of the contemporary roaming management systems, causing multi-billion dollars loss each…
Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not…
The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its…
Sybil resistance is a key requirement of decentralized consensus protocols. It is achieved by introducing a scarce resource (such as computational power, monetary stake, disk space, etc.), which prevents participants from costlessly…
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…
Due to its minimal energy requirement the PoS consensus protocol has become an attractive alternative to PoW in modern cryptocurrencies. In this protocol the chance of being selected as a block proposer in each round is proportional to the…
In blockchain systems, the scarcity of a resource is used as a Sybil protection mechanism. In Proof-of-Work blockchains, that resource is computing power. In the event of a fork, the scarcity of this resource theoretically prevents miners…
Trustless systems, such as those blockchain enpowered, provide trust in the system regardless of the trust of its participants, who may be honest or malicious. Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols and DAG-based approaches have emerged as a better…
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…
Blockchains combine other technologies, such as cryptography, networking, and incentive mechanisms, to enable the creation, validation, and recording of transactions between participating nodes. A consensus algorithm is used in a blockchain…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…
This paper centers around a simple yet crucial question for everyday users: How should one choose their delegated validators within proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols, particularly in the context of Ethereum 2.0? This has been a long-overlooked…
In blockchain systems, especially cryptographic currencies such as Bitcoin, the double-spending and Byzantine-general-like problem are solved by reaching consensus protocols among all nodes. The state-of-the-art protocols include…
Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols have provable safety and liveness properties for static validator sets. In practice, however, the validator set changes over time, potentially eroding the protocol's security guarantees. For…