Related papers: Keep Your Transactions On Short Leashes
Reinforcement learning (RL) has advanced greatly in the past few years with the employment of effective deep neural networks (DNNs) on the policy networks. With the great effectiveness came serious vulnerability issues with DNNs that small…
A major challenge in blockchain sharding protocols is that more than 95% transactions are cross-shard. Not only those cross-shard transactions degrade the system throughput but also double the confirmation time, and exhaust an already…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive domains including healthcare, legal services, and confidential communications, where privacy is paramount. This paper introduces Whisper Leak, a side-channel attack that…
The quality of learning generally improves with the scale and diversity of data. Companies and institutions can therefore benefit from building models over shared data. Many cloud and blockchain platforms, as well as government initiatives,…
Recent advances in long-context language models (LMs) have enabled million-token inputs, expanding their capabilities across complex tasks like computer-use agents. Yet, the safety implications of these extended contexts remain unclear. To…
Caches have been exploited to leak secret information due to the different times they take to handle memory accesses. Cache timing attacks include non-speculative cache side and covert channel attacks and cache-based speculative execution…
Blockchain Sharding is a blockchain performance enhancement approach. By splitting a blockchain into several parallel-run committees (shards), it helps increase transaction throughput, reduce computational resources required, and increase…
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…
We propose a novel approach for performing side-channel attacks on elliptic curve cryptography. Unlike previous approaches and inspired by the ``activity detection'' literature, we adopt a long-short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to…
Off-chain transaction networks can mitigate the scalability issues of today's trustless electronic cash systems such as Bitcoin. However, these peer-to-peer networks also introduce a new attack surface which is not well-understood today.…
Collateral is an item of value serving as security for the repayment of a loan. In blockchain-based loans, cryptocurrencies serve as the collateral. The high volatility of cryptocurrencies implies a serious barrier of entry with a common…
Integrating sharded blockchain with IoT presents a solution for trust issues and optimized data flow. Sharding boosts blockchain scalability by dividing its nodes into parallel shards, yet it's vulnerable to the $1\%$ attacks where…
LLM Agents are becoming central to intelligent systems. However, their deployment raises serious safety concerns. Existing defenses largely rely on "Safety Checks", which struggle to capture the complex semantic risks posed by harmful user…
Long-term planning, as in reinforcement learning (RL), involves finding strategies: actions that collectively work toward a goal rather than individually optimizing their immediate outcomes. As part of a strategy, some actions are taken at…
Recent studies on the safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) have revealed that existing approaches often operate superficially, leaving models vulnerable to various adversarial attacks. Despite their significance, these studies…
Due to their interesting features, blockchains have become popular in recent years. They are full-stack systems where security is a critical factor for their success. The main focus of this work is to systematize knowledge about security…
Large reasoning models (LRMs) often consume excessive tokens, inflating computational cost and latency. More broadly, in goal reaching sequential decision problems we often want to reach the goal quickly, and LRM reasoning can be viewed…
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…
In specialized domains, humans often compare new problems against similar examples, highlight nuances, and draw conclusions instead of analyzing information in isolation. When applying reasoning in specialized contexts with LLMs on top of a…
We present SmartShards: a new sharding algorithm for improving Byzantine tolerance and churn resistance in blockchains. Our algorithm places a peer in multiple shards to create an overlap. This simplifies cross-shard communication and shard…