Related papers: Undetectable Selfish Mining
Clients of permissionless blockchain systems, like Bitcoin, rely on an underlying peer-to-peer network to send and receive transactions. It is critical that a client is connected to at least one honest peer, as otherwise the client can be…
This paper integrates Austrian capital theory with repeated game theory to examine strategic miner behaviour under different institutional conditions in blockchain systems. It shows that when protocol rules are mutable, effective time…
Mining attacks enable an adversary to procure a disproportionately large portion of mining rewards by deviating from honest mining practices within the PoW-based blockchain system. In this paper, we demonstrate that the security…
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…
Bitcoin is the first implementation of what has become known as a 'public permissionless' blockchain. Guaranteeing security and protocol conformity through its elegant combination of cryptographic assurances and game theoretic economic…
Our aim is to determine conditions for quantum computing technology to give rise to security risks associated with quantum Bitcoin mining. Specifically, we determine the speed and energy efficiency a quantum computer needs to offer an…
As the core technology behind Bitcoin, Blockchain's decentralized, tamper-proof, and traceable features make it the preferred platform for organizational innovation. In current Bitcoin, block reward is halved every four years, and…
A new cybersecurity attack,where an adversary illicitly runs crypto-mining software over the devices of unaware users, is emerging in both the literature and in the wild . This attack, known as cryptojacking, has proved to be very effective…
Incentive mechanisms are central to the functionality of permissionless blockchains: they incentivize participants to run and secure the underlying consensus protocol. Designing incentive-compatible incentive mechanisms is notoriously…
Cryptographic Self-Selection is a paradigm employed by modern Proof-of-Stake consensus protocols to select a block-proposing "leader." Algorand [Chen and Micali, 2019] proposes a canonical protocol, and Ferreira et al. [2022] establish…
We study a game-theoretic model of blockchain mining economies and show that griefing, a practice according to which participants harm other participants at some lesser cost to themselves, is a prevalent threat at its Nash equilibria. The…
Cryptocurrency achieves distributed consensus using proof of work (PoW). Prior research in blockchain security identified financially incentivized attacks based on withholding blocks which have the attacker compromise a victim pool and pose…
Bitcoin is a top-ranked cryptocurrency that has experienced huge growth and survived numerous attacks. The protocols making up Bitcoin must therefore accommodate the growth of the network and ensure security. Security of the Bitcoin network…
As the most successful cryptocurrency to date, Bitcoin constitutes a target of choice for attackers. While many attack vectors have already been uncovered, one important vector has been left out though: attacking the currency via the…
Conventional financial models fail to explain the economic and monetary properties of cryptocurrencies due to the latter's dual nature: their usage as financial assets on the one side and their tight connection to the underlying blockchain…
Miners play a key role in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin: they invest substantial computational resources in processing transactions and minting new currency units. It is well known that an attacker controlling more than half of the…
Cryptographic Self-Selection is a subroutine used to select a leader for modern proof-of-stake consensus protocols, such as Algorand. In cryptographic self-selection, each round $r$ has a seed $Q_r$. In round $r$, each account owner is…
In this paper, we investigate two methods that allow us to automatically create profitable DeFi trades, one well-suited to arbitrage and the other applicable to more complicated settings. We first adopt the Bellman-Ford-Moore algorithm with…
Stratum, the de-facto mining communication protocol used by blockchain based cryptocurrency systems, enables miners to reliably and efficiently fetch jobs from mining pool servers. In this paper we exploit Stratum's lack of encryption to…
Lightning Network (LN) is a widely-used network of payment channels enabling faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions. In this paper, we outline three ways an attacker can steal funds from honest LN users. The attacks require dilating the…