Related papers: MAD-HTLC: Because HTLC is Crazy-Cheap to Attack
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, use an approach called "metering" to assign a cost to smart contract execution, an approach which is designed to incentivise miners to operate the network and protect it against DoS attacks. In the…
To achieve interoperability between unconnected ledgers, hash time lock contracts (HTLCs) are commonly used for cross-chain asset exchange. The solution tolerates transaction failure, and can "make the best out of worst'' by allowing…
Blockchains rely on economic incentives to ensure secure and decentralised operation, making incentive compatibility a core design concern. However, protocols are rarely deployed in isolation. Applications interact with the underlying…
In recent years, Ethereum gained tremendously in popularity, growing from a daily transaction average of 10K in January 2016 to an average of 500K in January 2020. Similarly, smart contracts began to carry more value, making them appealing…
Ethereum Smart Contracts based on Blockchain Technology (BT)enables monetary transactions among peers on a blockchain network independent of a central authorizing agency. Ethereum smart contracts are programs that are deployed as…
Validators in permissionless, large-scale blockchains, such as Ethereum, are typically payoff-maximizing, rational actors. Ethereum relies on in-protocol incentives, like rewards for correct and timely votes, to induce honest behavior and…
Corruption is a major global financial problem with billions of dollars rendered lost or unaccountable annually. Corruption through contract fraud is often conducted by withholding and/or altering financial information. When such scandals…
Smart contracts on a blockchain behave precisely as specified by their code. A vulnerability in this code can lead to unexpected behaviour, which is hard to fix because a blockchain does not allow to change smart contract code after its…
Ethereum is a permissionless blockchain ecosystem that supports execution of smart contracts, the key enablers of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFT). However, the expressiveness of Ethereum smart contracts is a…
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…
Financial fraud cases are on the rise even with the current technological advancements. Due to the lack of inter-organization synergy and because of privacy concerns, authentic financial transaction data is rarely available. On the other…
A smart contract is an interactive program that governs funds in the realm of a single cryptocurrency. Yet, the many existing cryptocurrencies have spurred the design of cross-chain applications that require interactions with multiple…
Smart contracts are software programs featuring both traditional applications and distributed data storage on blockchains. Ethereum is a prominent blockchain platform with the support of smart contracts. The smart contracts act as…
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,…
Blockchains are maintained by a network of participants that run algorithms designed to maintain collectively a distributed machine tolerant to Byzantine attacks. From the point of view of users, blockchains provide the illusion of…
Ethereum smart contracts hold tens of billions of USD in DeFi and NFTs, yet comprehensive security analysis remains difficult due to unverified code, proxy-based architectures, and the reliance on manual inspection of complex execution…
In blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, users compete in a transaction fee auction to get their transactions confirmed in the next block. A line of recent works set forth the desiderata for a "dream" transaction fee mechanism (TFM),…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of…
We present and validate a novel mathematical model of the blockchain mining process and use it to conduct an economic evaluation of the double-spend attack, which is fundamental to all blockchain systems. Our analysis focuses on the value…
As one of the representative blockchain platforms, Ethereum has attracted lots of attacks. Due to the existed financial loss, there is a pressing need to perform timely investigation and detect more attack instances. Though multiple systems…