Related papers: Commitment Attacks on Ethereum's Reward Mechanism
In May 2023, the Ethereum blockchain experienced its first inactivity leak, a mechanism designed to reinstate chain finalization amid persistent network disruptions. This mechanism aims to reduce the voting power of validators who are…
Immediate settlement, or single-slot finality (SSF), is a long-term goal for Ethereum. The growing active validator set size is placing an increasing computational burden on the network, making SSF more challenging. EIP-7251 aims to reduce…
In blockchain, bribery is an inevitable problem since users with various goals can bribe miners by transferring cryptoassets. To alleviate the negative effects of such collusion, Ethereum blockchain implemented new transaction fee mechanism…
Modern public blockchains like Ethereum rely on p2p networks to run distributed and censorship-resistant applications. With its wide adoption, it operates as a highly critical public ledger. On its transition to become more scalable and…
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…
Though voting-based consensus algorithms in Blockchain outperform proof-based ones in energy- and transaction-efficiency, they are prone to incur wrong elections and bribery elections. The former originates from the uncertainties of…
With the emergence of Miner Extractable Value (MEV), block construction markets on blockchains have evolved into a competitive arena. Following Ethereum's transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), the Proposer Builder…
Many prominent smart-contract applications such as payment channels, auctions, and voting systems often involve a mechanism in which some party must respond to a challenge or appeal some action within a fixed time limit. This pattern of…
Proof of Stake (PoS) protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consensus on the current state. If an enhanced majority of staking nodes, also called validators, agree on a proposed block, then this block is appended to the blockchain.…
Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) represents a pivotal challenge within the Ethereum ecosystem; it impacts the fairness, security, and efficiency of both Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2) networks. MEV arises when miners or validators manipulate…
The design of permissioned blockchains places an access control requirement for members to read, access, and write information over the blockchains. In this paper, we study a hierarchical scenario to include three types of participants:…
Smart Contracts and transactions allow users to implement elaborate constructions on cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Many of these constructions, including operational payment channels and atomic swaps, use a building…
In this paper, we identify a new form of attack, called the Balance attack, against proof-of-work blockchain systems. The novelty of this attack consists of delaying network communications between multiple subgroups of nodes with balanced…
Blockchain platforms such as Ethereum and several others execute complex transactions in blocks through user-defined scripts known as smart contracts. To append a correct block into blockchain, miners execute these transactions of smart…
Demand for blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is far larger than supply, necessitating a mechanism that selects a subset of transactions to include "on-chain" from the pool of all pending transactions. This paper investigates the…
Sophisticated mass attacks, especially when exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities, have the potential to cause destructive damage to organizations and critical infrastructure. To timely detect and contain such attacks, collaboration among the…
Censorship resistance is one of the core value proposition of blockchains. A recurring design pattern aimed at providing censorship resistance is enabling multiple proposers to contribute inputs into block construction. Notably, Fork-Choice…
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…
Ethereum is a decentralized Blockchain system that supports the execution of Turing-complete smart contracts. Although the security of the Ethereum ecosystem has been studied in the past, the network layer has been mostly neglected. We show…