Related papers: Profitable Manipulations of Cryptographic Self-Sel…
We propose a framework for threshold cryptosystems under a permissionless-economic model in which the participants are rational profit-maximizing entities. To date, threshold cryptosystems have been considered under permissioned settings…
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…
The aim of this work is to enhance blockchain security by deepening the understanding of selfish mining attacks in various consensus protocols, especially the ones that have the potential to mitigate selfish mining. Previous research was…
It has been known for some time that the Nakamoto consensus as implemented in the Bitcoin protocol is not totally aligned with the individual interests of the participants. More precisely, it has been shown that block withholding mining…
Bitcoin's (BTC) Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) has been a source of vulnerability for incentive attacks such as selfish mining, block withholding and coin hopping strategies. In this paper, first, we rigorously study the short-term…
Cryptocurrency miners have great latitude in deciding which transactions they accept, including their own, and the order in which they accept them. Ethereum miners in particular use this flexibility to collect MEV-Miner Extractable Value-by…
Trading on decentralized exchanges has been one of the primary use cases for permissionless blockchains with daily trading volume exceeding billions of U.S.~dollars. In the status quo, users broadcast transactions and miners are responsible…
We give a straightforward proof for the formula giving the long-term apparent hashrate of the Selfish Mining strategy in Bitcoin using only elementary probabilities and combinatorics, and more precisely, Dyck words. There is no need to…
A recent trend in multi-party computation is to achieve cryptographic fairness via monetary penalties, i.e. each honest player either obtains the output or receives a compensation in the form of a cryptocurrency. We pioneer another type of…
In blockchain networks adopting the proof-of-work schemes, the monetary incentive is introduced by the Nakamoto consensus protocol to guide the behaviors of the full nodes (i.e., block miners) in the process of maintaining the consensus…
Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on blockchain…
Bitcoin has been subject to illicit activities more often than probably any other financial assets, due to the pseudo-anonymous nature of its transacting entities. An ideal detection model is expected to achieve all the three properties of…
A new cybersecurity attack,where an adversary illicitly runs crypto-mining software over the devices of unaware users, is emerging in both the literature and in the wild . This attack, known as cryptojacking, has proved to be very effective…
Mining attacks allow adversaries to obtain a disproportionate share of the mining reward by deviating from the honest mining strategy in the Bitcoin system. Among them, the most well-known are selfish mining (SM), block withholding (BWH),…
Different types of malicious activities have been flagged in multiple permissionless blockchains such as bitcoin, Ethereum etc. While some malicious activities exploit vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of the blockchain, some target its…
Many of today's crypto currencies use blockchains as decentralized ledgers and secure them with proof of work. In case of a fork of the chain, Bitcoin's rule for achieving consensus is selecting the longest chain and discarding the other…
Incentive mechanisms are central to the functionality of permissionless blockchains: they incentivize participants to run and secure the underlying consensus protocol. Designing incentive-compatible incentive mechanisms is notoriously…
Proof-of-work allows Bitcoin to boast security amidst arbitrary fluctuations in participation of miners throughout time, so long as, at any point in time, a majority of hash power is honest. In recent years, however, the pendulum has…
The decentralization, redundancy, and pseudo-anonymity features have made permission-less public blockchain platforms attractive for adoption as technology platforms for cryptocurrencies. However, such adoption has enabled cybercriminals to…
Traditionally, peer-to-peer systems have relied on altruism and reciprocity. Although incentive-based models have gained prominence in new-generation peer-to-peer systems, it is essential to recognize the continued importance of cooperative…