Related papers: Accountable Safety for Rollups
Audit logs serve as a critical component in the enterprise business systems that are used for auditing, storing, and tracking changes made to the data. However, audit logs are vulnerable to a series of attacks, which enable adversaries to…
Bitcoin provides freshness properties by forming a blockchain where each block is associated with its timestamp and the previous block. Due to these properties, the Bitcoin protocol is being used as a decentralized, trusted, and secure…
We present two attacks targeting the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum consensus protocol. The first attack suggests a fundamental conceptual incompatibility between PoS and the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST) fork choice paradigm…
Blockchain applications often rely on lightweight clients to access and verify on-chain data efficiently without the need to run a resource-intensive full node. These light clients must maintain robust security to protect the blockchain's…
To implement a blockchain, we need a blockchain protocol for all the nodes to follow. To design a blockchain protocol, we need a block publisher selection mechanism and a chain selection rule. In Proof-of-Stake (PoS) based blockchain…
The growing scalability demand of public Blockchains led to the rise of Layer-2 solutions, such as Rollups. Rollups improve transaction throughput by processing operations off-chain and posting the results on-chain. A critical component in…
Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security…
On several proof-of-stake blockchains, agents engaged in validating transactions can open a pool to which others can delegate their stake in order to earn higher returns. We develop a model of staking pool formation in the presence of…
Blockchain (BC), the technology behind the Bitcoin crypto-currency system, is considered to be both alluring and critical for ensuring enhanced security and (in some implementations, non-traceable) privacy for diverse applications in many…
Blockchain protocols differ in fundamental ways, including the mechanics of selecting users to produce blocks (e.g., proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake) and the method to establish consensus (e.g., longest chain rules vs. Byzantine…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
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…
Provenance, which traces data from its creation to manipulation, is crucial for ensuring data integrity, reliability, and trustworthiness. It is valuable for single-user applications, collaboration within organizations, and across…
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…
Consensus protocols used today in blockchains often rely on computational power or financial stakes - scarce resources. We propose a novel protocol using social capital - trust and influence from social interactions - as a non-transferable…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular consensus protocol used by Bitcoin since its inception. PoW has the well-known flaw of assigning all the reward to the single miner (or pool) that inserts the new block. This has the consequence of making…
Blockchain relay schemes enable cross-chain state proofs without requiring trusted intermediaries. This is achieved by applying the source blockchain's consensus validation protocol on the target blockchain. Existing chain relays allow for…
Optimistic Rollups (ORUs) significantly enhance blockchain scalability but inherently suffer from the verifier's dilemma, particularly concerning validator attentiveness. Current systems lack mechanisms to proactively ensure validators are…
Accountability aims to provide explanations for why unwanted situations occurred, thus providing means to assign responsibility and liability. As such, accountability has slightly different meanings across the sciences. In computer science,…
Blockchains offer a useful abstraction: a trustworthy, decentralized log of totally ordered transactions. Traditional blockchains have problems with scalability and efficiency, preventing their use for many applications. These limitations…