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Distributed ledger systems, such as blockchains, rely on consensus protocols that commit ordered messages for processing. In practice, message ordering within these systems is often reward-driven. This raises concerns about fairness,…
Blockchain's economic value lies in enabling financial and economic transactions without relying on trusted, centralized intermediaries. In practice, however, transactions pass through a fragmented chain of intermediaries before being…
Recently, blockchain technology has become a topic in the spotlight but also a hotbed of various cybercrimes. Among them, phishing scams on blockchain have been found making a notable amount of money, thus emerging as a serious threat to…
Blockchains revolutionized centralized sectors like banking and finance by promoting decentralization and transparency. In a blockchain, information is transmitted through transactions issued by participants or applications. Miners…
Proof-of-stake blockchains require consensus protocols that support Dynamic Availability and Reconfiguration (so-called DAR setting), where the former means that the consensus protocol should remain live even if a large number of nodes…
Censorship resistance with short-term inclusion guarantees is an important feature of decentralized systems, missing from many state-of-the-art and even deployed consensus protocols. In leader-based protocols the leader arbitrarily selects…
Blockchain technology sparked renewed interest in planetary-scale Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) state machine replication (SMR). While recent works predominantly focused on improving the scalability and throughput of these protocols, few…
The exploitation of smart-contract vulnerabilities can have catastrophic consequences such as the loss of millions of pounds worth of crypto assets. Formal verification can be a useful tool in identifying vulnerabilities and proving that…
The Ethereum platform supports the decentralized execution of smart contracts, i.e. computer programs that transfer digital assets between users. The most common language used to develop these contracts is Solidity, a Javascript-like…
Ethereum is currently the second largest blockchain by market capitalization and a popular platform for cryptocurrencies. As it has grown, the high value present and the anonymity afforded by the technology have led Ethereum to become a…
The performance of partially synchronous BFT-based consensus protocols is highly dependent on the primary node. All participant nodes in the network are blocked until they receive a proposal from the primary node to begin the consensus…
Classical and contemporary distributed consensus protocols, may they be for binary agreement, state machine replication, or blockchain consensus, require all protocol participants in a peer-to-peer system to agree on exactly the same…
Avalanche is a blockchain consensus protocol with exceptionally low latency and high throughput. This has swiftly established the corresponding token as a top-tier cryptocurrency. Avalanche achieves such remarkable metrics by substituting…
Banking as an essential service can be hard to access in remote, rural regions where the network connectivity is intermittent. Although micro-banking has been made possible by SMS or USSD messages in some places, their security flaws and…
Compact block, which replaces transactions in the block with their hashes, is an effective means to speed up block propagation in the Bitcoin network. The compact block mechanism in Bitcoin counts on the fact that many nodes may already…
Obfuscation raises the interpretation cost of smart-contract auditing, yet its signals are hard to transfer across chains. We present HOBFNET, a fast surrogate of OBFPROBE, enabling million-scale cross-chain scoring. The model aligns with…
Recent advances in the blockchain research have been made in two important directions. One is refined resilience analysis utilizing game theory to study the consequences of selfish behaviors of users (miners), and the other is the extension…
Blockchains are distributed data structures that are used to achieve consensus in systems for cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin) or smart contracts (like Ethereum). Although blockchains gained a lot of popularity recently, there is no…
Bitcoin and Ethereum, whose miners arguably collectively comprise the most powerful computational resource in the history of mankind, offer no more power for processing and verifying transactions than a typical smart phone. The system…
A smart grid is an important application in Industry 4.0 with a lot of new technologies and equipment working together. Hence, sensitive data stored in the smart grid is vulnerable to malicious modification and theft. This paper proposes a…