Related papers: The Blockchain Imitation Game
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…
While many distributed consensus protocols provide robust liveness and consistency guarantees under the presence of malicious actors, quantitative estimates of how economic incentives affect security are few and far between. In this paper,…
We consider front-running to be a course of action where an entity benefits from prior access to privileged market information about upcoming transactions and trades. Front-running has been an issue in financial instrument markets since the…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) enables many novel applications that were impossible in traditional finances. However, it also introduces new types of vulnerabilities. An example of such vulnerabilities is a composability bug between token…
Over the past decade, the Bitcoin P2P network protocol has become a reference model for all modern cryptocurrencies. While nodes in this network are known, the connections among them are kept hidden, as it is commonly believed that this…
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 2021 Ethereum adjusted the transaction pricing mechanism by implementing EIP-1559, which introduces the base fee - a network fee that is burned and dynamically adjusts to the network demand. The authors of the Ethereum Improvement…
In recent years, Ethereum gained tremendously in popularity, growing from a daily transaction average of 10K in January 2016 to an average of 500K in January 2020. Similarly, smart contracts began to carry more value, making them appealing…
Blockchain-based decentralised lending is a rapidly growing and evolving alternative to traditional lending, but it poses new risks. To mitigate these risks, lending protocols have integrated automated risk management tools into their smart…
Blockchain systems are increasingly targeted by on-chain attacks that exploit contract vulnerabilities to extract value rapidly and stealthily, making systematic analysis and reproduction highly challenging. In practice, reproducing such…
In the past decades, the blockchain technology has attracted tremendous attention from both academia and industry. The popularity of blockchain networks was originated from a crypto-currency to serve as a decentralized and tamperproof…
The Internet of Things (IoT) connected by Software Defined Networking (SDN) promises to bring great benefits to cyber-physical systems. However, the increased attack surface offered by the growing number of connected vulnerable devices and…
Smart contracts are self-executing programs on a blockchain to ensure immutable and transparent agreements without the involvement of intermediaries. Despite the growing popularity of smart contracts for many blockchain platforms like…
Blockchain is gaining extensive attention due to its provision of secure and decentralized resource sharing manner. However, the incumbent blockchain systems also suffer from a number of challenges in operational maintenance, quality…
Blockchain is the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Blockchain is a robust distributed ledger that uses consensus algorithms to approve transactions in a decentralized manner, making malicious tampering extremely…
Financial systems have a growing reliance on computer-based and distributed systems, making FinTech systems vulnerable to advanced and quickly emerging cyber-criminal threats. Traditional security systems and fixed machine learning systems…
Cyber attacks are becoming more frequent and sophisticated, introducing significant challenges for organizations to protect their systems and data from threat actors. Today, threat actors are highly motivated, persistent, and well-founded…
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…
In this work, we reexamine the vulnerability of Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) to bribing attacks, where an adversary incentivizes blockchain miners to deliberately ignore a specific transaction to undermine the punishment mechanism of…
Blockchains enables tamper-proof, ordered logging for transactional data in a decentralized manner over open-access, overlay peer-to-peer networks. In this paper, we propose a decentralized framework of proactive caching in a hierarchical…