Related papers: CoMMA Protocol: Towards Complete Mitigation of Max…
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…
Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute payment transactions securely, but their performance is limited by the need for global consensus. Payment networks overcome this limitation through off-chain transactions. Instead of writing…
A blockchain, such as Bitcoin, is an append-only, secure, transparent, distributed ledger. A fair blockchain is expected to have healthy metrics; high honest mining power, low processing latency, i.e., low wait times for transactions and…
In this work, we introduce the private, anonymous, collateralizable commitments (PACCs) framework. PACCs allow any smart contract wallet holder to collateralize a claim, request, or commitment in general, in a private and anonymous manner.…
Smart contracts led to the emergence of the decentralized finance (DeFi) marketplace within blockchain ecosystems, where diverse participants engage in financial activities. In traditional finance, there are possibilities to create values,…
Users bid in a transaction fee mechanism (TFM) to get their transactions included and confirmed by a blockchain protocol. Roughgarden (EC'21) initiated the formal treatment of TFMs and proposed three requirements: user incentive…
Hyperledger Fabric is a popular permissioned blockchain system that features a highly modular and extensible system for deploying permissioned blockchains which are expected to have a major effect on a wide range of sectors. Unlike…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…
In recent years, many Blockchain based frameworks for transacting commodities on a congestible network have been proposed. In particular, as the number of controllable grid connected assets increases, there is a need for a decentralized,…
Recently, a number of existing blockchain systems have witnessed major bugs and vulnerabilities within smart contracts. Although the literature features a number of proposals for securing smart contracts, these proposals mostly focus on…
Validating a blockchain incurs heavy computation, communication, and storage costs. As a result, clients with limited resources, called light nodes, cannot verify transactions independently and must trust full nodes, making them vulnerable…
We propose a model suggesting that honest-but-rational consensus participants may play timing games, and strategically delay their block proposal to optimize MEV capture, while still ensuring the proposal's timely inclusion in the canonical…
The widespread adoption of EMV (Europay, Mastercard, and Visa) contactless payment systems has greatly improved convenience for both users and merchants. However, this growth has also exposed significant security challenges. This SoK…
Many prominent smart-contract applications such as payment channels, auctions, and voting systems often involve a mechanism in which some party must respond to a challenge or appeal some action within a fixed time limit. This pattern of…
Blockchain platforms such as Ethereum and several others execute complex transactions in blocks through user-defined scripts known as smart contracts. To append a correct block into blockchain, miners execute these transactions of smart…
In blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, users compete in a transaction fee auction to get their transactions confirmed in the next block. A line of recent works set forth the desiderata for a "dream" transaction fee mechanism (TFM),…
Miner extractable value (MEV) refers to any excess value that a transaction validator can realize by manipulating the ordering of transactions. In this work, we introduce a simple theoretical definition of the 'cost of MEV', prove some…
The prevalence of maximal extractable value (MEV) in the Ethereum ecosystem has led to a characterization of the latter as a dark forest. Studies of MEV have thus far largely been restricted to purely on-chain MEV, i.e., sandwich attacks,…
Ethereum block builders run sealed auctions among searchers, but nothing in the protocol forces a builder to honor the auction outcome after observing submitted bundles. This paper studies the commitment problem. We model a builder who…
Ethereum smart contracts operate in a concurrent environment where multiple transactions can be submitted simultaneously. However, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) enforces sequential execution of transactions within each block to prevent…