Related papers: A theoretical basis for MEV
The convergence of mobile edge computing (MEC) and blockchain is transforming the current computing services in wireless Internet-of-Things networks, by enabling task offloading with security enhancement based on blockchain mining. Yet the…
Trading on decentralized exchanges has been one of the primary use cases for permissionless blockchains with daily trading volume exceeding billions of U.S.~dollars. In the status quo, users broadcast transactions and miners are responsible…
Blockchains are maintained by a network of participants that run algorithms designed to maintain collectively a distributed machine tolerant to Byzantine attacks. From the point of view of users, blockchains provide the illusion of…
The rise of Ethereum has lead to a flourishing decentralized marketplace that has, unfortunately, fallen victim to frontrunning and Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) activities, where savvy participants game transaction orderings within a…
Automated Market Makers (AMMs) are decentralized applications that allow users to exchange crypto-tokens without the need for a matching exchange order. AMMs are one of the most successful DeFi use cases: indeed, major AMM platforms process…
Decentralized finance, i.e., DeFi, has become the most popular type of application on many public blockchains (e.g., Ethereum) in recent years. Compared to the traditional finance, DeFi allows customers to flexibly participate in diverse…
Randomness beacons based on Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) are increasingly proposed for blockchains and distributed systems, promising publicly verifiable delay and bias resistance. Existing analyses, however, treat adversaries purely…
With the escalating prevalence of malicious activities exploiting vulnerabilities in blockchain systems, there is an urgent requirement for robust attack detection mechanisms. To address this challenge, this paper presents a novel…
Cryptocurrency exchanges are frequently targeted and compromised by cyber-attacks, which may lead to significant losses for the depositors and closure of the affected exchanges. These risks threaten the viability of the entire public…
EMV is the international protocol standard for smartcard payment and is used in over 9 billion cards worldwide. Despite the standard's advertised security, various issues have been previously uncovered, deriving from logical flaws that are…
Model Extraction Attacks (MEAs) threaten modern machine learning systems by enabling adversaries to steal models, exposing intellectual property and training data. With the increasing deployment of machine learning models in distributed…
We study the problem of providing blockchain applications with \emph{economically viable randomness} (EVR), namely, randomness that has significant economic consequences. Applications of EVR include blockchain-based lotteries and gambling.…
Users of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications face significant risks from adversarial actions that manipulate the order of transactions to extract value from users. Such actions -- an adversarial form of what is called…
We describe a plausible probabilistic model for a blockchain queueing environment in which rational, profit-maximising schedulers impose adversarial disciplines on incoming messages containing a payload that encodes a state transition in a…
Decentralized applications are often composed of multiple interconnected smart contracts. This is especially evident in DeFi, where protocols are heavily intertwined and rely on a variety of basic building blocks such as tokens,…
Efficiency is a fundamental property of any type of program, but it is even more so in the context of the programs executing on the blockchain (known as smart contracts). This is because optimizing smart contracts has direct consequences on…
Automated Market Makers (AMMs) are essential to decentralized finance, offering continuous liquidity and enabling intermediary-free trading on blockchains. However, participants in AMMs are vulnerable to Maximal Extractable Value (MEV)…
With the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, there's a big demand for more processing power and resources in devices. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) looks promising for enhancing performance and reducing costs by offloading…
Centralized stablecoins such as USDT and USDC enforce sanctions through contract-layer blacklist functions. Yet on public blockchains, a freeze is still an ordinary transaction competing with the sanctioned party's transfer for priority. It…
Model extraction attacks are designed to steal trained models with only query access, as is often provided through APIs that ML-as-a-Service providers offer. Machine Learning (ML) models are expensive to train, in part because data is hard…