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Quantum-based cryptographic protocols are often said to enjoy security guaranteed by the fundamental laws of physics. However, even carefully designed quantum-based cryptographic schemes may be susceptible to subtle attacks that are outside…
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…
Bitcoin was recently introduced as a peer-to-peer electronic currency in order to facilitate transactions outside the traditional financial system. The core of Bitcoin, the Blockchain, is the history of the transactions in the system…
Recently, several works conjectured the vulnerabilities of mainstream blockchains under several network attacks. All these attacks translate into showing that the assumptions of these blockchains can be violated in theory or under…
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.…
Blockchain is one of the most discussed and highly accepted technologies, primarily due to its application in almost every field where third parties are needed for trust. Blockchain technology relies on distributed consensus for trust,…
In the Bitcoin system, participants are rewarded for solving cryptographic puzzles. In order to receive more consistent rewards over time, some participants organize mining pools and split the rewards from the pool in proportion to each…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have become an extremely important, highly-used, technology. A major criticism of cryptocurrencies, however, is their energy consumption. In May 2022 Bitcoin alone was reported to be consuming 150…
Due to Grover's algorithm, any exhaustive search attack of block ciphers can achieve a quadratic speed-up. To implement Grover,s exhaustive search and accurately estimate the required resources, one needs to implement the target ciphers as…
Eyal and Sirer's selfish mining strategy has demonstrated that Bitcoin system is not secure even if 50% of total mining power is held by altruistic miners. Since then, researchers have been investigating either to improve the efficiency of…
Blockchain plays a crucial role in ensuring the security and integrity of decentralized systems, with the proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism being fundamental for achieving distributed consensus. As PoW blockchains see broader adoption, an…
Proof-of-Work mining is intended to provide blockchains with robustness against double-spend attacks. However, an economic analysis that follows from Budish (2018), which considers free entry conditions together with the ability to rent…
Database search has wide applications and is used as a subroutine in many important algorithms. We shall consider a database with one target item. Quantum algorithm finds the target item in a database faster than any classical algorithm. It…
Shor's and Grover's algorithms' efficiency and the advancement of quantum computers imply that the cryptography used until now to protect one's privacy is potentially vulnerable to retrospective decryption, also known as \emph{harvest now,…
This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain on how the existence of multiple misbehaving pools influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner maintains a private chain and makes it…
Proof-of-work computation used in cryptocurrencies has witnessed significant growth in the U.S. and many other regions around the world. One of the most significant bottlenecks for the scalable deployment of such computation is its energy…
The energy sustainability of blockchains, whose consensus protocol rests on the Proof-of-Work, nourishes a heated debate. The underlying issue lies in a highly energy-consuming process, defined as mining, required to validate crypto-asset…
The Bitcoin network is burning a large amount of energy for mining. In this paper we estimate the lower bound for the global energy cost for a period of ten years from 2010, taking into account changing oil costs, improvements in hashing…
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…
Mining fairness in blockchain refers to equality between the computational resources invested in mining and the block rewards received. There exists a dilemma wherein increasing the transaction processing capacity of a blockchain…