Related papers: Keep Your Transactions On Short Leashes

We analyze bribing attacks in Proof-of-Stake distributed ledgers from a game theoretic perspective. In bribing attacks, an adversary offers participants a reward in exchange for instructing them how to behave, with the goal of attacking the…

Lateral movement attacks are a serious threat to enterprise security. In these attacks, an attacker compromises a trusted user account to get a foothold into the enterprise network and uses it to attack other trusted users, increasingly…

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…

Ethereum 2.0 is a major upgrade to improve its scalability, throughput, and security. In this version, RANDAO is the scheme to randomly select the users who propose, confirm blocks, and get rewards. However, a vulnerability, referred to as…

Modern blockchains face a scalability challenge due to the intrinsic throughput limitations of consensus protocols. Layer 2 optimistic rollups (L2) are a faster alternative that offer the same interface in terms of smart contract…

Cryptocurrencies are poised to revolutionize the modern economy by democratizing commerce. These currencies operate on top of blockchain-based distributed ledgers. Existing permissionless blockchain-based protocols offer unparalleled…

Blockchain systems benefit from lessons in prior art such as fault tolerance, distributed systems, peer-to-peer systems, and game theory. In this paper we argue that blockchain algorithms should tolerate both rational (self-interested)…

This thesis proposes techniques aiming to make blockchain technologies and smart contract platforms practical by improving their scalability, latency, and privacy. This thesis starts by presenting the design and implementation of…

With growing popularity, deep learning (DL) models are becoming larger-scale, and only the companies with vast training datasets and immense computing power can manage their business serving such large models. Most of those DL models are…

Dynamic partial reconfiguration enables multi-tenancy in cloud-based FPGAs, which presents security challenges for tenants, IPs, and data. Malicious users can exploit FPGAs for remote side-channel attacks (SCAs), and shared on-chip…

Safety-aligned large language models rely on RLHF and instruction tuning to refuse harmful requests, yet the internal mechanisms implementing safety behavior remain poorly understood. We introduce the Attention Redistribution Attack (ARA),…

Detection of malicious behavior is a fundamental problem in security. One of the major challenges in using detection systems in practice is in dealing with an overwhelming number of alerts that are triggered by normal behavior (the…

Large language models (LLMs) can often be made to behave in undesirable ways that they are explicitly fine-tuned not to. For example, the LLM red-teaming literature has produced a wide variety of 'jailbreaking' techniques to elicit harmful…

Modern distributed data management systems face a new challenge: how can autonomous, mutually-distrusting parties cooperate safely and effectively? Addressing this challenge brings up questions familiar from classical distributed systems:…

We provide a game-theoretic analysis of the problem of front-running attacks. We use it to distinguish attacks from legitimate competition among honest users for having their transactions included earlier in the block. We also use it to…

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a policy to maximize the task reward while satisfying safety constraints. While prior works focus on the performance optimality, we find that the optimal solutions of many safe RL problems are not…

Side-channel attacks (SCAs), which infer secret information (for example secret keys) by exploiting information that leaks from the implementation (such as power consumption), have been shown to be a non-negligible threat to modern…

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…

Adversarial examples have gained tons of attention in recent years. Many adversarial attacks have been proposed to attack image classifiers, but few work shift attention to object detectors. In this paper, we propose Sparse Adversarial…

Blockchain technology has become one of the most popular trends in IT over the last few years. Its increasing popularity and the discovery of ever more use cases raises the question of how to improve scalability. While researchers are…