Related papers: Breaking Blockchain Rationality with Out-of-Band C…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantee to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker's computational power does not exceed %50 of the network power. In this paper, we…
Censorship resilience is a fundamental assumption underlying the security of blockchain protocols. Additionally, the analysis of blockchain security from an economic and game theoretic perspective has been growing in popularity in recent…
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…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN) is designed to improve the scalability of blockchain systems by using off-chain payment paths to settle transactions in a faster, cheaper, and more private manner. This work aims to empirically study LN's…
Blockchains have sparked global interest in recent years, gaining importance as they increasingly influence technology and finance. This thesis investigates the robustness of blockchain protocols, specifically focusing on Ethereum…
Cooperation is fundamental for human prosperity. Blockchain, as a trust machine, is a cooperative institution in cyberspace that supports cooperation through distributed trust with consensus protocols. While studies in computer science…
Blockchain systems benefit from lessons in prior art such as fault tolerance, distributed systems, peer-to-peer systems, and game theory. In this paper we argue that blockchain algorithms should tolerate both rational (self-interested)…
Taking informed decisions, namely acting rationally, is an individual attitude of paramount relevance in nature and human societies. In this work, we study how rationality spreads in a community. To this end, through an agent-based model,…
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…
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…
Smart contract-enabled blockchains allow building decentralized applications in which mutually-distrusted parties can work together. Recently, oracle services emerged to provide these applications with real-world data feeds. Unfortunately,…
Blockchain protocols incentivize participation through monetary rewards, assuming rational actors behave honestly to maximize their gains. However, attackers may attempt to harm others even at personal cost. These denial of profit attacks…
Bribery is a perilous issue in the real world, especially in an economical aspect. This fraudulence is unavoidable, and more importantly, it is more difficult to trace in case smart contracts are utilized for bribing on a distributed public…
Cloud computing has become an irreversible trend. Together comes the pressing need for verifiability, to assure the client the correctness of computation outsourced to the cloud. Existing verifiable computation techniques all have a high…
Blockchains rely on economic incentives to ensure secure and decentralised operation, making incentive compatibility a core design concern. However, protocols are rarely deployed in isolation. Applications interact with the underlying…
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…
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…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
Off-chain protocols constitute one of the most promising approaches to solve the inherent scalability issue of blockchain technologies. The core idea is to let parties transact on-chain only once to establish a channel between them,…
Blockchain, the technology behind the popular Bitcoin, is considered a "security by design" system as it is meant to create security among a group of distrustful parties yet without a central trusted authority. The security of blockchain…