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Blockchain enables peer-to-peer transactions in cyberspace without a trusted third party. The rapid growth of Ethereum and smart contract blockchains generally calls for well-designed Transaction Fee Mechanisms (TFMs) to allocate limited…

Blockchain technology is widely expected to reduce transaction costs by automating contract enforcement and eliminating intermediaries; yet, the execution costs imposed by network congestion have received little attention in the operations…

Although blockchains have become widely popular for their use in cryptocurrencies, they are now becoming pervasive as more traditional applications adopt blockchain to ensure data security. Despite being a secured network, blockchains have…

Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…

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…

In this paper, we identify a new form of attack, called the Balance attack, against proof-of-work blockchain systems. The novelty of this attack consists of delaying network communications between multiple subgroups of nodes with balanced…

Consensus protocols are currently the bottlenecks that prevent blockchain systems from scaling. However, we argue that transaction execution is also important to the performance and security of blockchains. In other words, there are ample…

Traditional public blockchain systems typically had very limited transaction throughput because of the bottleneck of the consensus protocol itself. With recent advances in consensus technology, the performance limit has been greatly lifted,…

Congestion game is a widely used model for modern networked applications. A central issue in such applications is that the selfish behavior of the participants may result in resource overloading and negative externalities for the system…

Ethereum, a leading blockchain platform, has revolutionized the digital economy by enabling decentralized transactions and the execution of smart contracts. Ethereum transactions form the backbone of its network, facilitating peer-to-peer…

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…

Ethereum smart contracts operate in a concurrent environment where multiple transactions can be submitted simultaneously. However, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) enforces sequential execution of transactions within each block to prevent…

We analyze how secure a block is after the block becomes $k$-deep, i.e., security-latency, for Nakamoto consensus under an exponential network delay model. We provide the fault tolerance and extensive bounds on safety violation…

Message digest algorithms are one of the underlying building blocks of blockchain platforms such as Ethereum. This paper analyses situations in which the message digest collision resistance property can be exploited by attackers. Two…

As one of the representative blockchain platforms, Ethereum has attracted lots of attacks. Due to the existed financial loss, there is a pressing need to perform timely investigation and detect more attack instances. Though multiple systems…

Modern blockchains guarantee that submitted transactions will be included eventually; a property formally known as liveness. But financial activity requires transactions to be included in a timely manner. Unfortunately, classical liveness…

Optimistic responsiveness -- the ability of a consensus protocol to operate at the speed of the network -- is widely used in consensus protocol design to optimize latency and throughput. However, blockchain applications incentivize…

Modern cryptocurrency systems, such as Ethereum, permit complex financial transactions through scripts called smart contracts. These smart contracts are executed many, many times, always without real concurrency. First, all smart contracts…

Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising solution to address blockchain scalability and throughput challenges, However, the security of PCNs and their vulnerability to attacks are not sufficiently studied. In this paper, we introduce…

Blockchain systems come with the promise of being inclusive for a variety of decentralized applications (DApps) that can serve different purposes and have different urgency requirements. Despite this, the transaction fee mechanisms…