Related papers: DeFi composability as MEV non-interference
In recent days, the proliferation of several existing and new cyber-attacks pose an axiomatic threat to the stability of financial services. It is hard to predict the nature of attacks that can trigger a serious financial crisis. The…
This work addresses the critical challenges of upgrading smart contracts, which are vital for trust in automated transactions but difficult to modify once deployed. To address this issue, we propose SEAM, a novel framework that automates…
Federated Learning (FL) has been recently proposed as an emerging paradigm to build machine learning models using distributed training datasets that are locally stored and maintained on different devices in 5G networks while providing…
Corruption is a major global financial problem with billions of dollars rendered lost or unaccountable annually. Corruption through contract fraud is often conducted by withholding and/or altering financial information. When such scandals…
To non-experts, the traditional Centralized Finance (CeFi) ecosystem may seem obscure, because users are typically not aware of the underlying rules or agreements of financial assets and products. Decentralized Finance (DeFi), however, is…
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…
Most modern electronic devices can produce a random number. However, it is difficult to see how a group of mutually distrusting entities can have confidence in any such hardware-produced stream of random numbers, since the producer could…
Smart contracts are applications that execute on blockchains. Today they manage billions of dollars in value and motivate visionary plans for pervasive blockchain deployment. While smart contracts inherit the availability and other security…
User transactions on Ethereum's peer-to-peer network are at risk of being attacked. The smart contracts building decentralized finance (DeFi) have introduced a new transaction ordering dependency to the Ethereum blockchain. As a result,…
Smart contracts are programs running on top of blockchain platforms. They interact with each other through well-defined interfaces to perform financial transactions in a distributed system with no trusted third parties. But these interfaces…
Blockchains, and specifically smart contracts, have promised to create fair and transparent trading ecosystems. Unfortunately, we show that this promise has not been met. We document and quantify the widespread and rising deployment of…
Infrastructure maintenance is inherently complex, especially for widely dispersed transport systems like roads and railroads. Maintaining this infrastructure involves multiple partners working together to ensure safe, efficient upkeep that…
The trade-off of secrecy is the difficulty of verification. This trade-off means that contracts must be kept private, yet their compliance needs to be verified, which we call the secrecy-verifiability paradox. However, the existing smart…
The immutability of smart contracts on blockchain platforms like Ethereum promotes security and trustworthiness but presents challenges for updates, bug fixes, or adding new features post-deployment. These limitations can lead to…
In recent years, smart contracts have suffered major exploits, costing millions of dollars. Unlike traditional programs, smart contracts are deployed on a blockchain. As such, they cannot be modified once deployed. Though various tools have…
Permission-less blockchains can realise trustless trust, albeit at the cost of limiting the complexity of computation tasks. To explain the implications for scalability, we have implemented a trust model for smart contracts, described as…
Distributed immutable ledgers, or blockchains, allow the secure digitization of evidential transactions without relying on a trusted third-party. Evidential transactions involve the exchange of any form of physical evidence, such as money,…
Blockchain has emerged as a trusted and secure distributed ledger for transactions while also being decentralised, distributed and its legitimacy not guaranteed by a trusted authority. Since the appearance of Bitcoin, Blockchain has known…
Smart contracts on public blockchains now manage large amounts of value, and vulnerabilities in these systems can lead to substantial losses. As AI agents become more capable at reading, writing, and running code, it is natural to ask how…
MEV attacks have been an omnipresent evil in the blockchain world, an implicit tax that uninformed users pay for using the service. The problem arises from the miners' ability to reorder and insert arbitrary transactions in the blocks they…