Related papers: Toward Active and Passive Confidentiality Attacks …
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have surged in popularity over the last decade. Although Bitcoin does not claim to provide anonymity for its users, it enjoys a public perception of being a `privacy-preserving' financial system. In…
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are realized using distributed systems and hence critically rely on the performance and security of the interconnecting network. The requirements on these networks and their usage, however can differ…
We performed the first systematic study of a new attack on Ethereum that steals cryptocurrencies. The attack is due to the unprotected JSON-RPC endpoints existed in Ethereum nodes that could be exploited by attackers to transfer the Ether…
Bitcoin is a digital currency which relies on a distributed set of miners to mint coins and on a peer-to-peer network to broadcast transactions. The identities of Bitcoin users are hidden behind pseudonyms (public keys) which are…
We increasingly live in a world where there is a balance between the rights to privacy and the requirements for consent, and the rights of society to protect itself. Within this world, there is an ever-increasing requirement to protect the…
Recent work has demonstrated significant anonymity vulnerabilities in Bitcoin's networking stack. In particular, the current mechanism for broadcasting Bitcoin transactions allows third-party observers to link transactions to the IP…
The rise of smart contract systems such as Ethereum has resulted in a proliferation of blockchain-based decentralized applications including applications that store and manage a wide range of data. Current smart contracts are designed to be…
The Lightning Network, known for its millisecond settlement speeds and low transaction fees, offers a compelling alternative to traditional payment processors, which often have higher fees and longer processing times. This is particularly…
It is now a whole year since Lightning Network (LN) has been launched on the Bitcoi's mainnet. LN has been claimed as the solution for several of Bitcoin's weaknesses such as its difficulty to scale in number of transactions per second and…
We show how third-party web trackers can deanonymize users of cryptocurrencies. We present two distinct but complementary attacks. On most shopping websites, third party trackers receive information about user purchases for purposes of…
The bitcoin peer-to-peer network has drawn significant attention from researchers, but so far has mostly focused on publicly visible portions of the network, i.e., publicly reachable peers. This mostly ignores the hidden parts of the…
Although Bitcoin in its original whitepaper stated that it offers anonymous transactions, de-anonymization techniques have found otherwise. Therefore, alternative cryptocurrencies, like Dash, Monero, and Zcash, were developed to provide…
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) botnets are becoming widely used as a low-overhead, efficient, self-maintaining, distributed alternative to the traditional client/server model across a broad range of cyberattacks. These cyberattacks can take the form of…
Strategies related to the blockchain concept of Extractable Value (MEV/BEV), such as arbitrage, front-, or back-running create strong economic incentives for network nodes to reduce latency. Modified nodes, that minimize transaction…
The long-term success of cryptocurrencies largely depends on the incentive compatibility provided to the validators. Bribery attacks, facilitated trustlessly via smart contracts, threaten this foundation. This work introduces, implements,…
The rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which enable transactions with a degree of pseudonymity, has led to a surge in various illicit activities, including ransomware payments and transactions on darknet markets. These illegal…
The application of Bitcoin enables people to understand blockchain technology gradually. Bitcoin is a decentralized currency that does not rely on third-party credit institutions, and the core of Bitcoin's underlying technology is…
Recently, several works conjectured the vulnerabilities of mainstream blockchains under several network attacks. All these attacks translate into showing that the assumptions of these blockchains can be violated in theory or under…
Quantum computation represents a threat to many cryptographic protocols in operation today. It has been estimated that by 2035, there will exist a quantum computer capable of breaking the vital cryptographic scheme RSA2048. Blockchain…
Bitcoin (BTC) pseudonyms (layer 1) can effectively be deanonymized using heuristic clustering techniques. However, while performing transactions off-chain (layer 2) in the Lightning Network (LN) seems to enhance privacy, a systematic…