Related papers: Low-cost attacks on Ethereum 2.0 by sub-1/3 stakeh…
Smart contracts are a major tool in Ethereum transactions. Therefore hackers can exploit them by adding code vulnerabilities to their sources and using these vulnerabilities for performing malicious transactions. This paper presents two…
We study the risks of validator reuse across multiple services in a restaking protocol. We characterize the robust security of a restaking network as a function of the buffer between the costs and profits from attacks. For example, our…
Gasper, the consensus protocol currently employed by Ethereum, typically requires 64 to 95 slots -- the units of time during which a new chain extending the previous one by one block is proposed and voted -- to finalize. This means that…
Many blockchain-based decentralized services require their validators (operators) to deposit stake (collateral), which is forfeited (slashed) if they misbehave. Restaking networks let validators secure multiple services by reusing stake.…
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…
Consensus algorithms facilitate agreement on and resolution of blockchain functions, such as smart contracts and transactions. Ethereum uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which depends on financial incentives to ensure that…
With the promise of greater decentralization and sustainability, Ethereum transitioned from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The new consensus protocol introduces novel vulnerabilities that warrant…
Reentrancy, a notorious vulnerability in smart contracts, has led to millions of dollars in financial loss. However, current smart contract vulnerability detection tools suffer from a high false positive rate in identifying contracts with…
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…
We investigate a family of bugs in blockchain-based smart contracts, which we call event-ordering (or EO) bugs. These bugs are intimately related to the dynamic ordering of contract events, i.e., calls of its functions on the blockchain,…
Smart contracts---stateful executable objects hosted on blockchains like Ethereum---carry billions of dollars worth of coins and cannot be updated once deployed. We present a new systematic characterization of a class of trace…
Optimistic rollups rely on fraud proofs -- interactive protocols executed on Ethereum to resolve conflicting claims about the rollup's state -- to scale Ethereum securely. To mitigate against potential censorship of protocol moves, fraud…
Ethereum smart contracts are executable programs, deployed on a peer-to-peer network and executed in a consensus-based fashion. Their bytecode is public, immutable and once deployed to the blockchain, cannot be patched anymore. As smart…
The emerging blockchain protocols provide a decentralized architecture that is suitable of supporting Internet of Things (IoT) interactions. However, keeping a local copy of the blockchain ledger is infeasible for low-power and…
Ethereum holds multiple billions of U.S. dollars in the form of Ether cryptocurrency and ERC-20 tokens, with millions of deployed smart contracts algorithmically operating these funds. Unsurprisingly, the security of Ethereum smart…
Blockchains face a scalability limitation, partly due to the throughput limitations of consensus protocols, especially when aiming to obtain a high degree of decentralization. Layer 2 Rollups (L2s) are a faster alternative to conventional…
Many prominent smart-contract applications such as payment channels, auctions, and voting systems often involve a mechanism in which some party must respond to a challenge or appeal some action within a fixed time limit. This pattern of…
A growing number of products use layer 2 solutions to expand the capabilities of primary blockchains like Ethereum, where computation is off-loaded from the root chain, and the results are published to it in bulk. Those include optimistic…
Blockchain's economic value lies in enabling financial and economic transactions without relying on trusted, centralized intermediaries. In practice, however, transactions pass through a fragmented chain of intermediaries before being…
Scalability is a common issue among the most used permissionless blockchains, and several approaches have been proposed accordingly. As Ethereum is set to be a solid foundation for a decentralized Internet web, the need for tackling…