Related papers: Commitment Attacks on Ethereum's Reward Mechanism
Recent attacks exploiting errors in smart contract code had devastating consequences thereby questioning the benefits of this technology. It is currently highly challenging to fix errors and deploy a patched contract in time. Instant…
With the rapid advancement of blockchain technology, smart contracts have enabled the implementation of increasingly complex functionalities. However, ensuring the security of smart contracts remains a persistent challenge across the stages…
A smart contract that is deployed to a blockchain system like Ethereum is, under reasonable circumstances, expected to be immutable and tamper-proof. This is both a feature (promoting integrity and transparency) and a bug (preventing…
Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…
As the number of decentralized applications and users on Ethereum grows, the ability of the blockchain to efficiently handle a growing number of transactions becomes increasingly strained. Ethereums current execution model relies heavily on…
This paper presents an empirical analysis of Steemit, a key representative of the emerging incentivized social media platforms over Blockchains, to understand and evaluate the actual level of decentralization and the practical effects of…
The security of many Proof-of-Stake (PoS) payment systems relies on quorum-based State Machine Replication (SMR) protocols. While classical analyses assume purely Byzantine faults, real-world systems must tolerate both arbitrary failures…
We study game-theoretic models for capturing participation in blockchain systems. Permissionless blockchains can be naturally viewed as games, where a set of potentially interested users is faced with the dilemma of whether to engage with…
Committee-based blockchains are among the most popular alternatives of proof-of-work based blockchains, such as Bitcoin. They provide strong consistency (no fork) under classical assumptions, and avoid using energy-consuming mechanisms to…
This study tackles the computational challenges of solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) for a restricted class of problems. It is motivated by the Last Revealer Attack (LRA), which undermines fairness in some Proof-of-Stake (PoS)…
Ethereum has emerged as a leading platform for decentralized applications (dApps) due to its robust smart contract capabilities. One of the critical issues in the Ethereum ecosystem is Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), a concept that has…
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…
We study the competition between blockchains in a \emph{multi-chain} environment, where a dominant EVM-compatible blockchain (e.g., Ethereum) co-exists with an alternative EVM-compatible (e.g., Avalanche) and an EVM-incompatible (e.g.,…
We analyze maximal extractable value in multiple concurrent proposer blockchains, where multiple blocks become data available before their final execution order is determined. This concurrency breaks the single builder assumption of…
The transition of Ethereum from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism introduces a transformative approach to blockchain validation, offering enhanced scalability, energy efficiency, and security. However, this…
Blockchain solutions typically assume a synchronous network to ensure consistency and achieve consensus. In contrast, offline transaction systems aim to enable users to agree on and execute transactions without assuming bounded…
Scalability is a common issue among the most used permissionless blockchains, and several approaches have been proposed to solve this issue. Tackling scalability while preserving the security and decentralization of the network is a…
Smart contracts are a major tool in Ethereum transactions. Therefore hackers can exploit them by adding code vulnerabilities to their sources and using these vulnerabilities for performing malicious transactions. This paper presents two…
Blockchains offer strong security gurarantees, but cannot protect users against the ordering of transactions. Players such as miners, bots and validators can reorder various transactions and reap significant profits, called the Maximal…
To address the risks of validator centralization, Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) was introduced in Ethereum to divide the roles of block building and block proposing, fostering a more equitable and decentralized block production…