Related papers: Low-cost attacks on Ethereum 2.0 by sub-1/3 stakeh…
Currently, Gasper, the implemented consensus protocol of Ethereum, takes between 64 and 95 slots to finalize blocks. Because of that, a significant portion of the chain is susceptible to reorgs. The possibility to capture MEV (Maximum…
Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not…
In Ethereum, the practice of verifying the validity of the passed addresses is a common practice, which is a crucial step to ensure the secure execution of smart contracts. Vulnerabilities in the process of address verification can lead to…
Most permissionless blockchain networks run on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, which offer flexibility and decentralization at the expense of performance (e.g., network latency). Historically, this tradeoff has not been a bottleneck for most…
Over the last years, Ethereum has evolved into a public platform that safeguards the savings of hundreds of millions of people and secures more than $650 billion in assets, placing it among the top 25 stock exchanges worldwide in market…
Lightning Network (LN) is a widely-used network of payment channels enabling faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions. In this paper, we outline three ways an attacker can steal funds from honest LN users. The attacks require dilating the…
Recently, a number of existing blockchain systems have witnessed major bugs and vulnerabilities within smart contracts. Although the literature features a number of proposals for securing smart contracts, these proposals mostly focus on…
We use historical data to estimate the potential benefit of speculative techniques for executing Ethereum smart contracts in parallel. We replay transaction traces of sampled blocks from the Ethereum blockchain over time, using a simple…
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…
Blockchain validators can reduce block processing time by exploiting multi-core CPUs, but deterministic execution must preserve a given total order while respecting transaction conflicts and per-block runtime limits. This paper…
We reveal six zero-day social engineering attacks in Ethereum, and subdivide them into two classes: Address Manipulation and Homograph. We demonstrate the attacks by embedding them in source codes of five popular smart contracts with…
Banking as an essential service can be hard to access in remote, rural regions where the network connectivity is intermittent. Although micro-banking has been made possible by SMS or USSD messages in some places, their security flaws and…
Motivated by proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains such as Ethereum, two key desiderata have recently been studied for Byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) state-machine replication (SMR) consensus protocols: Finality means that the protocol retains…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) in Ethereum is a financial ecosystem built on the blockchain that has locked over 200 billion USD until April 2022. All transaction information is transparent and open when transacting through the DeFi protocol,…
We performed the first systematic study of a new attack on Ethereum that steals cryptocurrencies. The attack is due to the unprotected JSON-RPC endpoints existed in Ethereum nodes that could be exploited by attackers to transfer the Ether…
This paper explores the vulnerability of machine learning models, specifically Random Forest, Decision Tree, and K-Nearest Neighbors, to very simple single-feature adversarial attacks in the context of Ethereum fraudulent transaction…
Ethereum has undergone a recent change called \textit{the Merge}, which made Ethereum a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, shifting closer to BFT consensus. Ethereum, which wished to keep the best of the two protocol designs (BFT and…
We identify the slow liquidity drain (SLID) scam, an insidious and highly profitable threat to decentralized finance (DeFi), posing a large-scale, persistent, and growing risk to the ecosystem. Unlike traditional scams such as rug pulls or…
Payment channel networks provide a fast and scalable solution to relay funds, acting as a second layer to slower and less scalable blockchain protocols. In this paper, we present an accessible, low-cost attack in which the attacker…
Turing completeness has made Ethereum smart contracts attractive to blockchain developers and attackers alike. To increase code security, many tools can now spot most known vulnerabilities$-$at the cost of production efficiency. Recent…