Related papers: Flood & Loot: A Systemic Attack On The Lightning N…
In many blockchains, e.g., Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), the primary representation used for wallet addresses is a hardly memorable 40-digit hexadecimal string. As a result, users often select addresses from their recent transaction…
Open-access blockchains based on proof-of-work protocols have gained tremendous popularity for their capabilities of providing decentralized tamper-proof ledgers and platforms for data-driven autonomous organization. Nevertheless, the…
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…
Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…
Bitcoin is a top-ranked cryptocurrency that has experienced huge growth and survived numerous attacks. The protocols making up Bitcoin must therefore accommodate the growth of the network and ensure security. Security of the Bitcoin network…
Blockchain systems often rely on rationality assumptions for their security, expecting that nodes are motivated to maximize their profits. These systems thus design their protocols to incentivize nodes to execute the honest protocol but…
Nodes in the Lightning Network synchronise routing information through a gossip protocol that makes use of a staggered broadcast mechanism. In this work, we show that the convergence delay in the network is larger than what would be…
Cryptocurrency networks such as Bitcoin have emerged as a distributed alternative to traditional centralized financial transaction networks. However, there are major challenges in scaling up the throughput of such networks. Lightning…
Blockchain (BC) systems are highly distributed peer-to-peer networks that offer an alternative to centralized services and promise robustness to coordinated attacks. However, the resilience and overall security of a BC system rests heavily…
Recent estimates put the carbon footprint of Bitcoin and Ethereum at an average of 64 and 26 million tonnes of CO2 per year, respectively. To address this growing problem, several possible approaches have been proposed in the literature:…
Making a payment in a privacy-aware payment channel network is achieved by trying several payment paths until one succeeds. With a large network, such as the Lightning Network, a completion of a single payment can take up to several…
Cryptocurrencies are distributed systems that allow exchanges of native (and non-) tokens among participants. The complete historical bookkeeping and its wide availability opens up an unprecedented possibility, i.e. that of understanding…
Bitcoin is the first successful decentralized global digital cash system. Its mining process requires intense computational resources, therefore its usefulness remains a disputable topic. We aim to solve three problems with Bitcoin and…
Bitcoin recently introduced a new protocol for the encryption of peer-to-peer (P2P) communication. The protocol, known as V2 P2P transport, represents a big step towards securing the overlay network against various previously-known attack…
Q&A websites rely on user-generated responses, with incentives such as reputation scores or monetary rewards often offered. While some users may find it intrinsically rewarding to assist others, studies indicate that payment can improve the…
Blockchain technology, a foundational distributed ledger system, enables secure and transparent multi-party transactions. Despite its advantages, blockchain networks are susceptible to anomalies and frauds, posing significant risks to their…
Block-chain world is very dynamic and there is need for strong governance and underlying technology architecture to be robust to face challenges. This paper considers Ethereum, a leading block chain. We deep dive into the nature of this…
Layer-two blockchain protocols emerged to address scalability issues related to fees, storage cost, and confirmation delay of on-chain transactions. They aggregate off-chain transactions into a fewer on-chain ones, thus offering immediate…
Bribery is a perilous issue in the real world, especially in an economical aspect. This fraudulence is unavoidable, and more importantly, it is more difficult to trace in case smart contracts are utilized for bribing on a distributed public…
In this paper, we identify a new form of attack, called the Balance attack, against proof-of-work blockchain systems. The novelty of this attack consists of delaying network communications between multiple subgroups of nodes with balanced…