Related papers: Keep Your Transactions On Short Leashes
In the field of distributed consensus and blockchains, the synchronous communication model assumes that all messages between honest parties are delayed at most by a known constant $\Delta$. Recent literature establishes that the…
Micropayment channels are the most prominent solution to the limitation on transaction throughput in current blockchain systems. However, in practice channels are risky because participants have to be online constantly to avoid fraud, and…
Large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned to refuse harmful instructions through safety fine-tuning. A recent attack, termed abliteration, identifies and suppresses the single latent direction most responsible for refusal behavior,…
Decentralized resource markets are Web 3.0 applications that build open-access platforms for trading digital resources among users without any central management. They promise cost reduction, transparency, and flexible service provision.…
Attacks targeting several millions of non-internet based application users are on the rise. These applications such as SMS and USSD typically do not benefit from existing multi-factor authentication methods due to the nature of their…
Cross-chain bridges are a type of middleware for blockchain interoperability that supports the transfer of assets and data across blockchains. However, several of these bridges have vulnerabilities that have caused 3.2 billion dollars in…
Blockchains use peer-to-peer networks for disseminating information among peers, but these networks currently do not have any provable guarantees for desirable properties such as Byzantine fault tolerance, good connectivity and small…
The Lightning Network (LN) has enjoyed rapid growth over recent years, and has become the most popular scaling solution for the Bitcoin blockchain. The security of the LN relies on the ability of the nodes to close a channel by settling…
Safely aligning large language models (LLMs) often demands extensive human-labeled preference data, a process that's both costly and time-consuming. While synthetic data offers a promising alternative, current methods frequently rely on…
In this paper we describe LUNES-Blockchain, an agent-based simulator of blockchains that relies on Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS) techniques to obtain high scalability. The software is organized as a multi-level simulator that…
With the purpose of defending against lateral movement in today's borderless networks, Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) adoption is gaining momentum. With a full scale ZTA implementation, it is unlikely that adversaries will be able to spread…
Ethereum smart contracts are programs that are deployed and executed in a consensus-based blockchain managed by a peer-to-peer network. Several re-entrancy attacks that aim to steal Ether, the cryptocurrency used in Ethereum, stored in…
A rollup network is a type of popular "Layer 2" scaling solution for general purpose "Layer 1" blockchains like Ethereum. Rollups networks separate execution of transactions from other aspects like consensus, processing transactions off of…
Increasing the transactional throughput of decentralized blockchains in a secure manner has been the holy grail of blockchain research for most of the past decade. This paper introduces a scheme for scaling blockchains while retaining…
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) are extensively studied in various settings where the objective is to \textit{maximize} the actions' outcomes (i.e., rewards) over time. Since safety is crucial in many real-world problems, safe versions of MAB…
Cryptocurrencies, implemented with blockchain protocols, promise to become a global payment system if they can overcome performance limitations. Rapidly advancing architectures improve on latency and throughput, but most require all…
Fraudulent activities on digital banking services are becoming more intricate by the day, challenging existing defenses. While older rule driven methods struggle to keep pace, even precision focused algorithms fall short when new scams are…
Sharding is a promising blockchain scaling solution. But it currently suffers from high latency and low throughput when it comes to cross-shard transactions, i.e., transactions that require coordination from multiple shards. The root cause…
A blockchain replaces central counterparties with time-consuming consensus protocols to record the transfer of ownership. This settlement latency slows cross-exchange trading, exposing arbitrageurs to price risk. Off-chain settlement,…
The security of Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) algorithms deployed in real life applications are of a primary concern. In particular, the robustness of RL agents in cyber-physical systems against adversarial attacks are especially…