Related papers: Longest-chain Attacks: Difficulty Adjustment and T…
The security of Bitcoin protocols is deeply dependent on the incentives provided to miners, which come from a combination of block rewards and transaction fees. As Bitcoin experiences more halving events, the protocol reward converges to…
Efficient implementations of atomic objects such as concurrent stacks and queues are especially susceptible to programming errors, and necessitate automatic verification. Unfortunately their correctness criteria - linearizability with…
Adversarial training is arguably the most popular way to provide empirical robustness against specific adversarial examples. While variants based on multi-step attacks incur significant computational overhead, single-step variants are…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom…
Hash-based Proof-of-Work (PoW) used in the Bitcoin Blockchain leads to high energy consumption and resource wastage. In this paper, we aim to re-purpose the energy by replacing the hash function with real-life problems having commercial…
This paper investigates the stochastic behavior of an n-node blockchain which is continuously monitored and faces non-stop cyber attacks from multiple hackers. The blockchain will start being re-set once hacking is detected, forfeiting…
In today's connected world, resource constrained devices are deployed for sensing and decision making applications, ranging from smart cities to environmental monitoring. Those recourse constrained devices are connected to create real-time…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
Machine learning models using transaction records as inputs are popular among financial institutions. The most efficient models use deep-learning architectures similar to those in the NLP community, posing a challenge due to their…
We revisit the classic problem of dynamically maintaining shortest paths between all pairs of nodes of a directed weighted graph. The allowed updates are insertions and deletions of nodes and their incident edges. We give worst-case…
We present two attacks targeting the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum consensus protocol. The first attack suggests a fundamental conceptual incompatibility between PoS and the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST) fork choice paradigm…
In light of the burgeoning success of reinforcement learning (RL) in diverse real-world applications, considerable focus has been directed towards ensuring RL policies are robust to adversarial attacks during test time. Current approaches…
We study the probabilistic distribution of the confirmation time of Bitcoin transactions, conditional on the current memory pool (i.e., the queue of transactions awaiting confirmation). The results of this paper are particularly interesting…
We lay the foundations for a blockchain scheme, whose consensus is reached via a proof of work algorithm based on the solution of consecutive discrete logarithm problems over the point group of elliptic curves. In the considered…
Selfish mining is a well known vulnerability in blockchains exploited by miners to steal block rewards. In this paper, we explore a new form of selfish mining attack that guarantees high rewards with low cost. We show the feasibility of…
Mining attacks allow adversaries to obtain a disproportionate share of the mining reward by deviating from the honest mining strategy in the Bitcoin system. Among them, the most well-known are selfish mining (SM), block withholding (BWH),…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains have emerged as a robust and effective consensus mechanism in open environments, leading to widespread deployment with numerous cryptocurrency platforms and substantial investments. However, the commonly…
Bitcoin's security relies on its Proof-of-Work consensus, where miners solve puzzles to propose blocks. The puzzle's difficulty is set by the difficulty adjustment mechanism (DAM), based on the network's available mining power. Attacks that…
Stubborn mining attack greatly downgrades Bitcoin throughput and also benefits malicious miners (attackers). This paper aims to quantify the impact of block receiving delay on stubborn mining attack severity in imperfect Bitcoin networks.…
Timing side-channel attacks exploit variations in program execution time to recover sensitive information. Cryptographic implementations are especially vulnerable to these attacks, since even small timing differences in operations such as…