Related papers: Commitment Attacks on Ethereum's Reward Mechanism
Mining in proof-of-work blockchains has become an expensive affair requiring specialized hardware capable of executing several megahashes per second at huge electricity costs. Miners earn a reward each time they mine a block within the…
We performed the first systematic study of a new attack on Ethereum that steals cryptocurrencies. The attack is due to the unprotected JSON-RPC endpoints existed in Ethereum nodes that could be exploited by attackers to transfer the Ether…
In the Ethereum network, miners are incentivized to include transactions in a block depending on the gas price specified by the sender. The sender of a transaction therefore faces a trade-off between timely inclusion and cost of his…
The security of most existing cryptocurrencies is based on a concept called Proof-of-Work, in which users must solve a computationally hard cryptopuzzle to authorize transactions (`one unit of computation, one vote'). This leads to enormous…
Consider a set of parties invited to execute a protocol $\Pi$. The protocol will incur some cost to run while in the end (or at regular intervals), it will populate and update local tables that assign (virtual) rewards to participants. Each…
This publication describes the block winner selection process that will be used in a novel Proof-of-Useful-Work blockchain for High Energy Physics that the authors are currently working on. Instead of spamming hashing operations to mine…
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…
In recent years, Ethereum gained tremendously in popularity, growing from a daily transaction average of 10K in January 2016 to an average of 500K in January 2020. Similarly, smart contracts began to carry more value, making them appealing…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) has become a critical issue for blockchain ecosystems, as it enables validators or block proposers to extract value by ordering, including or censoring users' transactions. This paper aims to present a formal…
The rise of smart contract systems such as Ethereum has resulted in a proliferation of blockchain-based decentralized applications including applications that store and manage a wide range of data. Current smart contracts are designed to be…
The multi-chain future is upon us. Modular architectures are coming to maturity across the ecosystem to scale bandwidth and throughput of cryptocurrency. One example of such is the Ethereum modular architecture, with its beacon chain, its…
Ethereum smart contracts are highly powerful, immutable, and able to retain massive amounts of tokens. However, smart contracts keep attracting attackers to benefit from smart contract flaws and Ethereum unexpected behavior. Thus,…
Over the last years, Ethereum has evolved into a public platform that safeguards the savings of hundreds of millions of people and secures more than $650 billion in assets, placing it among the top 25 stock exchanges worldwide in market…
Web 3.0 represents the next generation of the Internet, which is widely recognized as a decentralized ecosystem that focuses on value expression and data ownership. By leveraging blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies, Web 3.0…
Message digest algorithms are one of the underlying building blocks of blockchain platforms such as Ethereum. This paper analyses situations in which the message digest collision resistance property can be exploited by attackers. Two…
We study the problem of providing blockchain applications with \emph{economically viable randomness} (EVR), namely, randomness that has significant economic consequences. Applications of EVR include blockchain-based lotteries and gambling.…
Blockchain is a novel technology that is rising a lot of interest in the industrial and re- search sectors because its properties of decentralisation, immutability and data integrity. Initially, the underlying consensus mechanism has been…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is value extractable by temporary monopoly power commonly found in decentralized systems. This extraction stems from a lack of user privacy upon transaction submission and the ability of a monopolist…
We use historical data to estimate the potential benefit of speculative techniques for executing Ethereum smart contracts in parallel. We replay transaction traces of sampled blocks from the Ethereum blockchain over time, using a simple…
Smart contracts are central to a myriad of critical blockchain applications, from financial transactions to supply chain management. However, their adoption is hindered by security vulnerabilities that can result in significant financial…