Related papers: Low-cost attacks on Ethereum 2.0 by sub-1/3 stakeh…
In this work, we explore the class of Ethereum smart contracts called the administrated ERC20 tokens. We demonstrate that these contracts are more owner-controlled and less safe than the services they try to disrupt, such as banks and…
Simple commit-reveal beacons are vulnerable to last-revealer strategies, and existing descriptions often leave accountability and recovery mechanisms unspecified for practical deployments. We present Commit-Reveal$^2$, a layered design for…
Layer-2 (L2) blockchains inherit Ethereums security guarantees while reducing gas fees. As a result, they are gaining traction among traders at Automated Market Makers (AMMs), sparking debate over whether they contribute to liquidity…
An attacker that gains access to a cryptocurrency user's private keys can perform any operation in her stead. Due to the decentralized nature of most cryptocurrencies, no entity can revert those operations. This is a central challenge for…
Billions of dollars are lost every year in DeFi platforms by transactions exploiting business logic or accounting vulnerabilities. Existing defenses focus on static code analysis, public mempool screening, attacker contract detection, or…
BitCoin transactions are malleable in a sense that given a transaction an adversary can easily construct an equivalent transaction which has a different hash. This can pose a serious problem in some BitCoin distributed contracts in which…
We study an auction with $m$ identical items in a context where $n$ agents can arbitrarily commit to strategies. In general, such commitments non-trivially change the equilibria by inducing a metagame of choosing which strategies to commit…
As decentralized applications on permissionless blockchains are prevalent, more and more latency-sensitive usage scenarios emerged, where the lower the latency of sending and receiving messages, the better the chance of earning revenue. To…
In blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, transactions represent the primary mechanism that the external world can use to trigger a change of blockchain state. Transactions serve as key sources of evidence and play a vital role in…
Due to the modern relevance of blockchain technology, smart contracts present both substantial risks and benefits. Vulnerabilities within them can trigger a cascade of consequences, resulting in significant losses. Many current papers…
Ethereum Smart contracts use blockchain to transfer values among peers on networks without central agency. These programs are deployed on decentralized applications running on top of the blockchain consensus protocol to enable people to…
Ethereum's ideals of decentralization and censorship resistance are undermined in practice, motivating ongoing efforts to reestablish these properties. Existing proposals for fairness mechanisms depend on the assumption that a sufficient…
We study the economics of transaction reverts on Ethereum rollups and show that they are not accidental failures but equilibrium outcomes of MEV strategies. Using execution traces from major L2s, we find that over 80% of reverted…
The decentralization, redundancy, and pseudo-anonymity features have made permission-less public blockchain platforms attractive for adoption as technology platforms for cryptocurrencies. However, such adoption has enabled cybercriminals to…
Smart contracts are a secure and trustworthy application that plays a vital role in decentralized applications in various fields such as insurance,the internet, and gaming. However, in recent years, smart contract security breaches have…
Many blockchain networks aim to preserve the anonymity of validators in the peer-to-peer (P2P) network, ensuring that no adversary can link a validator's identifier to the IP address of a peer due to associated privacy and security…
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…
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,…
We show that a replicated state machine (such as a blockchain protocol) can retain liveness in a strategic setting even while facing substantial ambiguity over certain events. This is implemented by a complementary protocol called "Machine…
Blockchain based systems allow various kinds of financial transactions to be executed in a decentralized manner. However, these systems often rely on a trusted third party (oracle) to get correct information about the real-world events,…