Related papers: Three Attacks on Proof-of-Stake Ethereum
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…
The core of a blockchain network is its consensus algorithm. Starting with the Proof-of-Work, there have been various versions of consensus algorithms, such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS), Proof-of-Authority (PoA), and Practical Byzantine Fault…
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…
The blockchain data structure maintained via the longest-chain rule---popularized by Bitcoin---is a powerful algorithmic tool for consensus algorithms. Such algorithms achieve consistency for blocks in the chain as a function of their depth…
Blockchain relay schemes enable cross-chain state proofs without requiring trusted intermediaries. This is achieved by applying the source blockchain's consensus validation protocol on the target blockchain. Existing chain relays allow for…
We study an adversary who attacks a Proof-of-Work (POW) blockchain by selfishly constructing an alternative longest chain. We characterize optimal strategies employed by the adversary when a difficulty adjustment rule al\`a Bitcoin applies.…
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocols often face a trade-off between performance and security. Protocols that pre-elect leaders for subsequent rounds are vulnerable to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, which can disrupt the network and…
Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks.…
User transactions on Ethereum's peer-to-peer network are at risk of being attacked. The smart contracts building decentralized finance (DeFi) have introduced a new transaction ordering dependency to the Ethereum blockchain. As a result,…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) on Ethereum has undergone significant transformations since its emergence during the DeFi summer of 2020. With the introduction of Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS), the transaction…
We compare the total capital efficiency of secure restaking and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocols. First, we consider the sufficient condition for the restaking graph to be secure. The condition implies that it is always possible to transform…
The Ethereum Improvement Proposal 3675 (EIP-3675) marks a significant shift, transitioning from a Proof of Work (PoW) to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. This transition resulted in a staggering 99.95% decrease in energy…
Consensus protocols inherently rely on the notion of leader election, in which one or a subset of participants are temporarily elected to authorize and announce the network's latest state. While leader election is a well studied problem,…
In the proof-of-stake (PoS) paradigm for maintaining decentralized, permissionless cryptocurrencies, Sybil attacks are prevented by basing the distribution of roles in the protocol execution on the stake distribution recorded in the ledger…
Designing an efficient difficulty control algorithm is an essential problem in Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains because the network hash rate is randomly changing. This paper proposes a general difficulty control algorithm and provides…
The introduction of Bitcoin fueled the development of blockchain-based resilient data management systems that are resilient against failures, enable federated data management, and can support data provenance. The key factor determining the…
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…
Blockchain technology has become a trusted method for establishing secure and transparent transactions through a distributed, encrypted network. The operation of blockchain is governed by consensus algorithms, among which Proof of Stake…
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…
Parallel Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocols have been suggested in the literature to improve the safety guarantees, transaction throughput and confirmation latencies of Nakamoto consensus. In this work, we first consider the existing parallel…