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Bitcoin was recently introduced as a peer-to-peer electronic currency in order to facilitate transactions outside the traditional financial system. The core of Bitcoin, the Blockchain, is the history of the transactions in the system…
Bitcoin derives a verifiable temporal order from probabilistic block discovery and cumulative proof-of-work rather than from a trusted global clock. We show that block arrivals exhibit stable exponential behavior across difficulty epochs,…
We consider a class of interdependent security games on networks where each node chooses a personal level of security investment. The attack probability experienced by a node is a function of her own investment and the investment by her…
For preserving privacy, blockchains can be equipped with dedicated mechanisms to anonymize participants. However, these mechanism often take only the abstraction layer of blockchains into account whereas observations of the underlying…
Rollups have become the de facto scalability solution for Ethereum, securing more than $55B in assets. They achieve scale by executing transactions on a Layer 2 ledger, while periodically posting data and finalizing state on the Layer 1,…
As of July 15, 2023, Ethererum, which is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain [1] has around 410 Billion USD in total assets on chain (popularly referred to as total-value-locked, TVL) but has only 33 Billion USD worth of ETH staked in…
Open-access blockchains based on proof-of-work protocols have gained tremendous popularity for their capabilities of providing decentralized tamper-proof ledgers and platforms for data-driven autonomous organization. Nevertheless, the…
Smart contract-enabled blockchains allow building decentralized applications in which mutually-distrusted parties can work together. Recently, oracle services emerged to provide these applications with real-world data feeds. Unfortunately,…
While Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely used consensus mechanism for blockchain, it received harsh criticism due to its massive waste of energy for meaningless hash calculation. Some studies have introduced Proof-of-Stake to address…
In blockchain networks adopting the proof-of-work schemes, the monetary incentive is introduced by the Nakamoto consensus protocol to guide the behaviors of the full nodes (i.e., block miners) in the process of maintaining the consensus…
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…
Recently, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms on Ethereum are booming, and numerous traders are trying to capitalize on the opportunity for maximizing their benefits by launching front-running attacks and extracting Miner Extractable…
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, use an approach called "metering" to assign a cost to smart contract execution, an approach which is designed to incentivise miners to operate the network and protect it against DoS attacks. In the…
Blockchain applications that rely on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) have increasingly become energy inefficient with a staggering carbon footprint. In contrast, energy-efficient alternative consensus protocols such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS) may…
Cryptoeconomic incentives in the form of blockchain-based tokens are seen as an enabler of the sharing economy that could shift society towards greater sustainability. Nevertheless, knowledge of the impact of these tokens on human sharing…
ASIC cryptocurrency miners are a core component of blockchain infrastructures, directly converting computation and energy into monetary value. Despite their economic importance, their security is rarely evaluated in a structured manner. In…
Cryptocurrency miners have great latitude in deciding which transactions they accept, including their own, and the order in which they accept them. Ethereum miners in particular use this flexibility to collect MEV-Miner Extractable Value-by…
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…
We consider the block withholding attacks on pools, more specifically the state-of-the-art Power Adjusting Withholding (PAW) attack. We propose a generalization called Temporary PAW (T-PAW) where the adversary withholds a fPoW from pool…
Censorship resilience is a fundamental assumption underlying the security of blockchain protocols. Additionally, the analysis of blockchain security from an economic and game theoretic perspective has been growing in popularity in recent…