Related papers: Frontrunning Block Attack in PoA Clique: A Case St…
The outsourcing of the design and manufacturing of integrated circuits has raised severe concerns about the piracy of Intellectual Properties and illegal overproduction. Logic locking has emerged as an obfuscation technique to protect…
The development of quantum information platforms such as quantum computers and quantum simulators that will rival classical Turing computations are typically viewed as a threat to secure data transmissions and therefore to crypto-systems…
Liquid staking has become the largest category of decentralized finance protocols in terms of total value locked. However, few studies exist on its implementation designs or underlying risks. The liquid staking protocols allow for earning…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a fundamental underlying technology behind most major blockchain cryptocurrencies. It has been previously pointed out that quantum devices provide a computational advantage in performing PoW in the context of Bitcoin.…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology and proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism where nodes spend computing resources and earn rewards in return for spending these resources. This incentive system has caused power to be significantly biased towards a…
Leader Election (LE) is crucial in distributed systems and blockchain technology, ensuring one participant acts as the leader. Traditional LE methods often depend on distributed random number generation (RNG), facing issues like…
Blockchain stores information into a chain of "blocks", whose integrity is usually guaranteed by Proof of Work (PoW). In many blockchain applications (including cryptocurrencies), users compete with each other to win the ownership of the…
Ethereum prospered the inception of a plethora of smart contract applications, ranging from gambling games to decentralized finance. However, Ethereum is also considered a highly adversarial environment, where vulnerable smart contracts…
The transaction ordering dependency of the smart contracts building decentralized exchanges (DEXes) allow for predatory trading strategies. In particular, front-running attacks present a constant risk for traders on DEXes. Whereas legal…
Security analysis of blockchain technology is an active domain of research. There has been both cryptographic and game-theoretic security analysis of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. Prominent work includes the cryptographic security…
Credit allows a lender to loan out surplus capital to a borrower. In the traditional economy, credit bears the risk that the borrower may default on its debt, the lender hence requires upfront collateral from the borrower, plus interest fee…
Decentralized finance revolutionizes traditional financial systems by leveraging blockchain technology to reduce trust. However, some vulnerabilities persist, notably front-running by malicious actors who exploit transaction information to…
Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, while central to achieving decentralized consensus, has long been criticized for excessive energy use and hardware inefficiencies \cite{devries2018bitcoin, truby2018decarbonizing}. This paper…
The security and decentralization of Proof-of-Work (PoW) have been well-tested in existing blockchain systems. However, its tremendous energy waste has raised concerns about sustainability. Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) aims to redirect the…
Blockchain-based Distributed Ledgers (DLs) promise to transform the existing financial system by making it truly democratic. In the past decade, blockchain technology has seen many novel applications ranging from the banking industry to…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) in Ethereum is a financial ecosystem built on the blockchain that has locked over 200 billion USD until April 2022. All transaction information is transparent and open when transacting through the DeFi protocol,…
In blockchain-based order book systems, buyers and sellers trade assets, while it is miners to match them and include their transactions in the blockchain. It is found that many miners behave selfishly and myopically, prioritizing…
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain systems, especially those that allow stakeholders to organize themselves in ``stake-pools'', have emerged as a compelling paradigm for the deployment of large scale distributed ledgers. A stake-pool operates…
Regardless of their variations, blockchains require a consensus mechanism to validate transactions, supervise added blocks, maintain network security, synchronize the network state, and distribute incentives. Proof-of-Work (PoW), one of the…
Blockchain validators can reduce block processing time by exploiting multi-core CPUs, but deterministic execution must preserve a given total order while respecting transaction conflicts and per-block runtime limits. This paper…