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In this paper we present an open source, fully asynchronous, leaderless algorithm for reaching consensus in the presence of Byzantine faults in an asynchronous network. We prove the algorithm's correctness provided that less than a third of…
Classic Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols forfeit liveness in the face of asynchrony in order to preserve safety, whereas most deployed blockchain protocols forfeit safety in order to remain live. In this work, we achieve the…
Replication protocols are essential for distributed systems, ensuring consistency, reliability, and fault tolerance. Traditional Crash Fault Tolerant (CFT) protocols, which assume a fail-stop model, are inadequate for untrusted cloud…
Bitcoin demonstrated the possibility of a financial ledger that operates without the need for a trusted central authority. However, concerns persist regarding its security and considerable energy consumption. We assess the consensus…
Bitcoin's limited programmability and transaction throughput have historically prevented native Bitcoin from participating in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. Existing solutions depend on honest-majority thresholds, or centralized…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) has the potential to disrupt centralized finance by validating peer-to-peer transactions through tamper-proof smart contracts, thus significantly lowering the transaction cost charged by financial…
Fueled by the growing popularity of proof-of-stake blockchains, there has been increasing interest and progress in permissioned consensus protocols, which could provide a simpler alternative to existing protocols, such as Paxos and PBFT. In…
Smart contracts power decentralized financial (DeFi) services but are vulnerable to security exploits that can lead to significant financial losses. Existing security measures often fail to adequately protect these contracts due to the…
Much of the recent excitement around decentralized finance (DeFi) comes from hopes that DeFi can be a secure, private, less centralized alternative to traditional finance systems. However, people moving to DeFi sites in hopes of improving…
In this paper, we explore vulnerabilities and countermeasures of the recently proposed blockchain consensus based on proof-of-authority. The proof-of-work blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, have been shown both theoretically and…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus, a cornerstone of blockchain technology, has seen significant advancements. While existing BFT protocols ensure security guarantees, they often suffer from efficiency challenges, particularly under…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications introduce novel financial instruments replicating and extending traditional ones through blockchain-based smart contracts. Among these applications, DeFi derivatives protocols enable the creation…
Modern blockchain systems operating in adversarial environments require robust consensus protocols that guarantee both safety and termination under network delay attacks. Tendermint, a widely adopted consensus protocol in consortium…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols are crypto projects developed on the blockchain to manage digital assets. Attacks on DeFi have been frequent and have resulted in losses exceeding \$77 billion. However, detection methods for malicious…
We propose a new Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol constructed with a verifiable random function (VRF) and a verifiable delay function (VDF) that has the following properties: a) all addresses with positive stake can participate; b) is fair…
An attacker that gains access to a cryptocurrency user's private keys can perform any operation in her stead. Due to the decentralized nature of most cryptocurrencies, no entity can revert those operations. This is a central challenge for…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus exhibits higher throughput in comparison to Proof of Work (PoW) in blockchains. But BFT-based protocols suffer from scalability problems with respect to the number of replicas in the network. The…
The meteoric rise of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been accompanied by a plethora of frequent and often financially devastating attacks on its protocols There have been over 70 exploits of DeFi protocols, with the total of lost funds…
Blockchain consensus protocols enable participants to agree on consistent views of the blockchain that may be ahead or behind relative to each other but do not fork into different chains. A number of recently popular…
Consensus protocols have traditionally been studied in a setting where all participants are known to each other from the start of the protocol execution. In the parlance of the 'blockchain' literature, this is referred to as the…