Related papers: Model Checking Bitcoin and other Proof-of-Work Con…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantee to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker's computational power does not exceed %50 of the network power. In this paper, we…
The energy sustainability of blockchains, whose consensus protocol rests on the Proof-of-Work, nourishes a heated debate. The underlying issue lies in a highly energy-consuming process, defined as mining, required to validate crypto-asset…
Recently efficient model-checking tools have been developed to find flaws in security protocols specifications. These flaws can be interpreted as potential attacks scenarios but the feasability of these scenarios need to be confirmed at the…
Although proof of work (PoW) consensus dominates the current blockchain-based systems mostly, it has always been criticized for the uneconomic brute-force calculation. As alternatives, energy-conservation and energy-recycling mechanisms…
Concurrent accesses to databases are typically encapsulated in transactions in order to enable isolation from other concurrent computations and resilience to failures. Modern databases provide transactions with various semantics…
Blockchain systems run consensus rules as code to agree on the state of the distributed ledger and secure the network. Changing these rules can be risky and challenging. In addition, it can often be controversial and take much effort to…
The idea of security sharing goes back to Nakamoto's introduction of merge mining, a technique that enables Bitcoin miners to reuse their hash power to bootstrap and secure other Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. However, with the rise of…
We argue that recent developments in proof-of-work consensus mechanisms can be used in accordance with advancements in formal verification techniques to build a distributed payment protocol that addresses important economic drawbacks from…
In the light of the recent fame of Blockchain technologies, numerous proposals and projects aiming at better practical viability have emerged. However, formally assessing their particularities and benefits has proven to be a difficult task.…
Blockchain has recently attracted the attention of the industry due, in part, to its ability to automate asset transfers. It requires distributed participants to reach a consensus on a block despite the presence of malicious (a.k.a.…
Bitcoin provides freshness properties by forming a blockchain where each block is associated with its timestamp and the previous block. Due to these properties, the Bitcoin protocol is being used as a decentralized, trusted, and secure…
Combinations of active automata learning, model-based testing and model checking have been successfully used in numerous applications, e.g., for spotting bugs in implementations of major network protocols and to support refactoring of…
Proof-of-work blockchains need to be carefully designed so as to create the proper incentives for miners to faithfully maintain the network in a sustainable way. This paper describes how the economic engineering of the Conflux Network, a…
This paper develops a formal game-theoretic model to examine how protocol mutability disrupts cooperative mining behaviour in blockchain systems. Using a repeated game framework with stochastic rule shocks, we show that even minor…
As cryptographic tokens and altcoins are increasingly being built to serve as utility tokens, the notion of useful work consensus protocols, as opposed to number-crunching PoW consensus, is becoming ever more important. In such contexts,…
Testing of network services represents one of the biggest challenges in cyber security. Because new vulnerabilities are detected on a regular basis, more research is needed. These faults have their roots in the software development cycle or…
Blockchain has recently been depicted as a secure protocol for information exchange in cyber-physical microgrids. However, it is still found vulnerable to consensus manipulation attacks. These stealth attacks are often difficult to detect…
We propose a proof-of-work algorithm that rewards blockchain miners for using computational resources to solve NP-complete puzzles. The resulting blockchain will publicly store and improve solutions to problems with real world applications…
This paper proposes a protocol for Proof of Assets of a bitcoin exchange using the Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (ZK-SNARK) without revealing either the bitcoin addresses of the exchange or balances…
Over the past decade, the Bitcoin P2P network protocol has become a reference model for all modern cryptocurrencies. While nodes in this network are known, the connections among them are kept hidden, as it is commonly believed that this…