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Blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer from scalability issues. Sharding is one of the most promising and leading solutions to scale blockchain. The basic idea behind sharding is to divide the blockchain network into multiple…
Payment channel networks (PCN) enable scalable blockchain transactions without fundamentally changing the underlying distributed ledger algorithm. However, routing a payment via multiple channels in a PCN requires locking collateral for…
Conflicting transactions within blockchain networks not only pose performance challenges but also introduce security vulnerabilities, potentially facilitating malicious attacks. In this paper, we explore the impact of conflicting…
Forks in the Bitcoin network result from the natural competition in the blockchain's Proof-of-Work consensus protocol. Their frequency is a critical indicator for the efficiency of a distributed ledger as they can contribute to resource…
Blockchains protect an ecosystem worth more than $500bn with strong security properties derived from the principle of decentralization. Is today's blockchain decentralized? In this paper, we empirically studied one of the least…
We study the strategic implications that arise from adding one extra option to the miners participating in the bitcoin protocol. We propose that when adding a block, miners also have the ability to pay forward an amount to be collected by…
Quantum computation represents a threat to many cryptographic protocols in operation today. It has been estimated that by 2035, there will exist a quantum computer capable of breaking the vital cryptographic scheme RSA2048. Blockchain…
This study provides a practical introduction to high-frequency trading in blockchain-based currency markets. These types of markets have some specific characteristics that differentiate them from the stock markets, such as a large number of…
The frequent occurrences of cascading failures in power grids have been receiving continuous attention in recent years. An urgent task for us is to understand the cascading failure vulnerability of power grids against various kinds of…
A family of existing protocols for quantum sealed-bid auction is critically analyzed, and it is shown that they are vulnerable under several attacks (e.g., the participant's and non-participant's attacks as well as the collusion attack of…
Blockchains add transactions to a distributed shared ledger by arriving at consensus on sets of transactions contained in blocks. This provides a total ordering on a set of global transactions. However, total ordering is not enough to…
It has been known that heterogeneous networks are vulnerable to the intentional removal of a small fraction of highly connected or loaded nodes, which implies that, to protect a network effectively, a few important nodes should be allocated…
Credit allows a lender to loan out surplus capital to a borrower. In the traditional economy, credit bears the risk that the borrower may default on its debt, the lender hence requires upfront collateral from the borrower, plus interest fee…
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,…
The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is detrimental to businesses and individuals as we are heavily relying on the Internet. Due to remarkable profits, crackers favor DDoS as cybersecurity weapons in attacking servers, computers,…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies secure a decentralized consensus protocol by incentives. The protocol participants, called miners, generate (mine) a series of blocks, each containing monetary transactions created by system users. As…
The once mythological 51% attack has moved beyond the hypothetical and now poses a legitimate widespread threat to blockchain technology. Current blockchains provide inferior throughput capacity when compared to that of centralized systems,…
The trustless nature of permissionless blockchains renders overcollateralization a key safety component relied upon by decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. Nonetheless, factors such as price volatility may undermine this mechanism. In…
Illicit crypto-mining leverages resources stolen from victims to mine cryptocurrencies on behalf of criminals. While recent works have analyzed one side of this threat, i.e.: web-browser cryptojacking, only commercial reports have partially…
Blockchain systems often employ proof-of-work consensus protocols to validate and add transactions into hashchains. These protocols stimulate competition among miners in solving cryptopuzzles (e.g. SHA-256 hash computation in Bitcoin) in…