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Over the past three years, especially following WannaCry malware, ransomware has become one of the biggest concerns for private businesses, state, and local government agencies. According to Homeland Security statistics, 1.5 million…
The emergence of quantum computing presents a formidable challenge to the security of blockchain systems. Traditional cryptographic algorithms, foundational to digital signatures, message encryption, and hashing functions, become vulnerable…
Peer-to-Peer networks are designed to rely on resources of their own users. Therefore, resource management plays an important role in P2P protocols. Therefore, resource management plays an important role in P2P protocols. Early P2P networks…
With the escalating prevalence of malicious activities exploiting vulnerabilities in blockchain systems, there is an urgent requirement for robust attack detection mechanisms. To address this challenge, this paper presents a novel…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
In this paper, we systematically explore the attack surface of the Blockchain technology, with an emphasis on public Blockchains. Towards this goal, we attribute attack viability in the attack surface to 1) the Blockchain cryptographic…
Bitcoin-NG, a scalable blockchain protocol, divides each block into a key block and many micro blocks to effectively improve the transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG has a special incentive mechanism (i.e. splitting transaction fees…
Blockchain is a distributed database which is cryptographically protected against malicious modifications. While promising for a wide range of applications, current blockchain platforms rely on digital signatures, which are vulnerable to…
In this study, we examine the behavior and profitability of modern malware that mines cryptocurrency. Unlike previous studies, we look at the cryptocurrency market as a whole, rather than just Bitcoin. We not only consider PCs, but also…
Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency that relies on cryptography rather than trusted third parties such as central banks for its security. Underpinning the operation of the currency is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network that facilitates…
We describe and analyze perishing mining, a novel block-withholding mining strategy that lures profit-driven miners away from doing useful work on the public chain by releasing block headers from a privately maintained chain. We then…
Payment channel networks are an approach to improve the scalability of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. The Lightning Network is a payment channel network built for Bitcoin that is already used in practice. Because the Lightning Network…
Blockchain technologies have been rapidly enhanced in recent years. However, its scalability still has limitations in terms of throughput and broadcast delay as the network and the amount of transaction data increase. To improve scalability…
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…
Blockchain address poisoning is an emerging phishing attack that crafts "similar-looking" transfer records in the victim's transaction history, which aims to deceive victims and lure them into mistakenly transferring funds to the attacker.…
Modern blockchains increasingly rely on parallel execution to improve throughput. We show several industry and academic transaction fee mechanisms (TFMs) struggle to simultaneously account for execution parallelism while remaining…
We revisit the fundamental question of Bitcoin's security against double spending attacks. While previous work has bounded the probability that a transaction is reversed, we show that no such guarantee can be effectively given if the…
The Lightning Network (LN) is a prominent payment channel network aimed at addressing Bitcoin's scalability issues. Due to the privacy of channel balances, senders cannot reliably choose sufficiently liquid payment paths and resort to a…
Cybercrimes are becoming a bigger menace to both people and corporations. It poses a serious challenge to the modern digital world. According to a press release from 2019 Cisco and Cybersecurity Ventures, Cisco stopped seven trillion…
Bitcoin cryptocurrency system enables users to transact securely and pseudo-anonymously by using an arbitrary number of aliases (Bitcoin addresses). Cybercriminals exploit these characteristics to commit immutable and presumably untraceable…