Related papers: CoMMA Protocol: Towards Complete Mitigation of Max…
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…
Researchers have discovered a series of theoretical attacks against Bitcoin's Nakamoto consensus; the most damaging ones are selfish mining, double-spending, and consistency delay attacks. These attacks have one common cause: block…
Conflicting transactions within blockchain networks not only pose performance challenges but also introduce security vulnerabilities, potentially facilitating malicious attacks. In this paper, we explore the impact of conflicting…
Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…
Transaction fees represent a major incentive in many blockchain systems as a way to incentivize processing transactions. Unfortunately, they also introduce an enormous amount of incentive asymmetry compared to alternatives like fixed block…
With the promise of greater decentralization and sustainability, Ethereum transitioned from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The new consensus protocol introduces novel vulnerabilities that warrant…
The emergence of decentralized finance has transformed asset trading on the blockchain, making traditional financial instruments more accessible while also introducing a series of exploitative economic practices known as Maximal Extractable…
The detection of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) in blockchain is crucial for enhancing blockchain security, as it enables the evaluation of potential consensus layer risks, the effectiveness of anti-centralization solutions, and the…
Block space on the blockchain is scarce and must be allocated efficiently through block building. However, Ethereum's current block-building ecosystem, MEV-Boost, has become highly centralized due to integration, which distorts competition,…
Blockchain offers a decentralized, immutable, transparent system of records. It offers a peer-to-peer network of nodes with no centralised governing entity making it unhackable and therefore, more secure than the traditional paper-based or…
ECDSA signatures form the bedrock of blockchain transaction authentication, yet their security critically depends on proper nonce generation. We uncover a critical vulnerability in the Polygon MEV ecosystem: systematic nonce reuse that…
The successive generations of consensus algorithms have progressively shifted the performance bottleneck of blockchains to the execution layer. While recent works address this by parallelizing transaction execution, they often overlook the…
In the realm of smart contract security, transaction malice detection has been able to leverage properties of transaction traces to identify hacks with high accuracy. However, these methods cannot be applied in real-time to revert malicious…
Rollups have become the de facto scalability solution for Ethereum, securing more than $55B in assets. They achieve scale by executing transactions on a Layer 2 ledger, while periodically posting data and finalizing state on the Layer 1,…
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…
We present V0LVER, an AMM protocol which solves an incentivization trilemma between users, passive liquidity providers, and block producers. V0LVER enables users and passive liquidity providers to interact without paying MEV or incurring…
We examine the current state of the cross-domain world, with particular focus on the protocols being used/planned for use by multi-domain users. We build on existing frameworks for analyzing how MEV is extracted, while also adding a new…
Transaction Fee Mechanism Design studies auctions run by untrusted miners for transaction inclusion in a blockchain. Under previously-considered desiderata, an auction is considered `good' if, informally-speaking, each party (i.e., the…
EMV, also known as "Chip and PIN", is the leading system for card payments worldwide. It is used throughout Europe and much of Asia, and is starting to be introduced in North America too. Payment cards contain a chip so they can execute an…
We provide an economic model of Execution Tickets and use it to study the ability of the Ethereum protocol to capture MEV from block construction. We demonstrate that Execution Tickets extract all MEV when all buyers are homogeneous, risk…