Related papers: Frontrunning Block Attack in PoA Clique: A Case St…
Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training of machine learning models without sharing training data. Traditional FL heavily relies on a trusted centralized server. Although decentralized FL eliminates the central dependence, it…
Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on blockchain…
Within just four years, the blockchain-based Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem has accumulated a peak total value locked (TVL) of more than 253 billion USD. This surge in DeFi's popularity has, unfortunately, been accompanied by many…
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…
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…
Most concurrent blockchain systems rely heavily on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms for decentralized consensus and security assurance. However, the substantial energy expenditure stemming from computationally…
With the promise of greater decentralization and sustainability, Ethereum transitioned from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The new consensus protocol introduces novel vulnerabilities that warrant…
Contemporary blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute transactions serially by miners and validators and determine the Proof-of-Work (PoW). Such serial execution is unable to exploit modern multi-core resources efficiently, hence…
Sharding is a prominent technique for scaling blockchains. By dividing the network into smaller components known as shards, a sharded blockchain can process transactions in parallel without introducing inconsistencies through the…
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…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols are crypto projects developed on the blockchain to manage digital assets. Attacks on DeFi have been frequent and have resulted in losses exceeding \$77 billion. However, detection methods for malicious…
The exploitation of smart contract vulnerabilities in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has resulted in financial losses exceeding 3 billion US dollars. Existing defense mechanisms primarily focus on detecting and reacting to adversarial…
The Proof of Efficient Liquidity (PoEL) protocol, designed for specialised Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus-based blockchains that incorporate intrinsic DeFi applications, aims to support sustainable liquidity bootstrapping and network…
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are blockchain-based organizations that facilitate decentralized governance. Today, DAOs not only hold billions of dollars in their treasury but also govern many of the most popular…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols are crypto projects developed on the blockchain to manage digital assets. Attacks on DeFi have been frequent and have resulted in losses exceeding $80 billion. Current tools detect and locate possible…
In the paper, we present designs for multiple blockchain consensus primitives and a novel blockchain system, all based on the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX-enabled CPUs. First, we show how using TEEs for…
Proof of Stake (PoS) is a burgeoning Sybil resistance mechanism that aims to have a digital asset ("token") serve as security collateral in crypto networks. However, PoS has so far eluded a comprehensive threat model that encompasses both…
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…
With the evolution of blockchain technology, the issue of transaction security, particularly on platforms like Ethereum, has become increasingly critical. Front-running attacks, a unique form of security threat, pose significant challenges…
Recently, two attacks were presented against Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum: one where short-range reorganizations of the underlying consensus chain are used to increase individual validators' profits and delay consensus decisions, and one…