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Reentrancy is a well-known source of smart contract bugs on Ethereum, leading e.g. to double-spending vulnerabilities in DeFi applications. But less is known about this problem in other blockchains, which can have significantly different…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Roman Kashitsyn , Robin Künzler , Ognjen Marić , Lara Schmid

Demand for blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is far larger than supply, necessitating a mechanism that selects a subset of transactions to include "on-chain" from the pool of all pending transactions. This paper investigates the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Tim Roughgarden

We analyze bribing attacks in Proof-of-Stake distributed ledgers from a game theoretic perspective. In bribing attacks, an adversary offers participants a reward in exchange for instructing them how to behave, with the goal of attacking the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Dimitris Karakostas , Aggelos Kiayias , Thomas Zacharias

Smart contracts deployed on blockchains such as Ethereum routinely manage large amounts of assets, making their security critical. Empirical studies show that real-world attacks often exploit flaws in the business logic of contracts that…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Massimo Bartoletti , Angelo Ferrando , Enrico Lipparini , Vadim Malvone

The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-08-28 Jona Harris , Aviv Zohar

As the Ethereum platform continues to mature and gain widespread usage, it is crucial to maintain high standards of smart contract writing practices. While bad practices in smart contracts may not directly lead to security issues, they…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Xiaoqi Li , Zongwei Li , Wenkai Li , Yuqing Zhang , Xin Wang

Ethereum smart contracts are programs that can be collectively executed by a network of mutually untrusted nodes. Smart contracts handle and transfer assets of values, offering strong incentives for malicious attacks. Intrusion attacks are…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-11-28 Xinming Wang , Jiahao He , Zhijian Xie , Gansen Zhao , Shing-Chi Cheung

Ethereum smart contracts are highly powerful, immutable, and able to retain massive amounts of tokens. However, smart contracts keep attracting attackers to benefit from smart contract flaws and Ethereum unexpected behavior. Thus,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Wejdene Haouari , Abdelhakim Senhaji Hafid , Marios Fokaefs

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…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2019-10-21 G. Hall , M. Mansi , I. Makrant

Smart Contracts (SCs) in Ethereum can automate tasks and provide different functionalities to a user. Such automation is enabled by the `Turing-complete' nature of the programming language (Solidity) in which SCs are written. This also…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-06-28 Rachit Agarwal , Tanmay Thapliyal , Sandeep Kumar Shukla

Bitcoin's (BTC) Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) has been a source of vulnerability for incentive attacks such as selfish mining, block withholding and coin hopping strategies. In this paper, first, we rigorously study the short-term…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Mustafa Doger , Sennur Ulukus

Mining in proof-of-work blockchains has become an expensive affair requiring specialized hardware capable of executing several megahashes per second at huge electricity costs. Miners earn a reward each time they mine a block within the…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Arti Vedula , Abhishek Gupta , Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan

Smart contracts are central to a myriad of critical blockchain applications, from financial transactions to supply chain management. However, their adoption is hindered by security vulnerabilities that can result in significant financial…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Dalila Ressi , Alvise Spanò , Lorenzo Benetollo , Carla Piazza , Michele Bugliesi , Sabina Rossi

Mining processes of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are currently incentivized with voluntary transaction fees and fixed block rewards which will halve gradually to zero. In the setting where optional and arbitrary transaction fee…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Tiantian Gong , Mohsen Minaei , Wenhai Sun , Aniket Kate

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Taro Tsuchiya , Liyi Zhou , Kaihua Qin , Arthur Gervais , Nicolas Christin

Using blockchain technology, it is possible to create contracts that offer a reward in exchange for a trained machine learning model for a particular data set. This would allow users to train machine learning models for a reward in a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-03-01 A. Besir Kurtulmus , Kenny Daniel

There is growing interest in providing programmatic access to the value locked in Bitcoin, which famously offers limited programmability itself. Various approaches have been put forth in recent years, with the vast majority of proposed…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Ryan Croote , Islam El-Ashi , Thomas Locher , Yvonne-Anne Pignolet

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Taro Tsuchiya , Jin-Dong Dong , Kyle Soska , Nicolas Christin

The Lightning Network (LN) is one of the most promising off-chain scaling solutions for Bitcoin, as it enables off-chain payments which are not subject to the well-known blockchain scalability limit. In this work, we introduce CLoTH, a…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Marco Conoscenti , Antonio Vetrò , Juan Carlos De Martin , Federico Spini , Fabio Castaldo , Sebastiano Scròfina

With the increase of the adoption of blockchain technology in providing decentralized solutions to various problems, smart contracts have become more popular to the point that billions of US Dollars are currently exchanged every day through…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-01-24 Feng Mi , Chen Zhao , Zhuoyi Wang , Sadaf MD Halim , Xiaodi Li , Zhouxiang Wu , Latifur Khan , Bhavani Thuraisingham