Related papers: How much should you pay for restaking security?
Reinforcement learning is a powerful paradigm for learning optimal policies from experimental data. However, to find optimal policies, most reinforcement learning algorithms explore all possible actions, which may be harmful for real-world…
Nowadays, the utilization of the ever expanding amount of data has made a huge impact on web technologies while also causing various types of security concerns. On one hand, potential gains are highly anticipated if different organizations…
Per-token billing is now the standard pricing model for commercial large language models (LLMs), so the honesty of reported token counts directly affects what users pay. We show that this kind of billing is hard to audit by design:…
The problem of pricing the cloud has attracted much recent attention due to the widespread use of cloud computing and cloud services. From a theoretical perspective, several mechanisms that provide strong efficiency or fairness guarantees…
Data storage systems are more reliable than their individual components. In order to build highly reliable systems out of less reliable parts, systems introduce redundancy. In replicated systems, objects are simply copied several times with…
The study of how to set up cryptocurrency incentive mechanisms and to operationalize governance is token economics. Given the $250 billion market cap for cryptocurrencies, there is compelling need to investigate this topic. In this paper,…
Financial systems run nonstop and must stay reliable even during cyber incidents. Modern attacks move across many services (apps, APIs, identity, payment rails), so defenders must make a sequence of actions under time pressure. Most…
We formally study iterated block ciphers that alternate between two sequences of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) rounds. It is demonstrated that, in some cases the effect of alternating increases security, while in other…
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…
We provide a game-theoretic analysis of the problem of front-running attacks. We use it to distinguish attacks from legitimate competition among honest users for having their transactions included earlier in the block. We also use it to…
Incentives that compensate for the involved costs in the decentralized training of a Federated Learning (FL) model act as a key stimulus for clients' long-term participation. However, it is challenging to convince clients for quality…
Lending protocols are one of the main applications of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), enabling crypto-assets loan markets with a total value estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. Unlike traditional lending systems, these protocols…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
Constrained Reinforcement Learning has been employed to enforce safety constraints on policy through the use of expected cost constraints. The key challenge is in handling expected cost accumulated using the policy and not just in a single…
Congestion game is a widely used model for modern networked applications. A central issue in such applications is that the selfish behavior of the participants may result in resource overloading and negative externalities for the system…
Docker offers an ecosystem that offers a platform for application packaging, distributing, and managing within containers. However, the Docker platform has not yet matured. Presently, Docker is less secured than virtual machines (VM) and…
Cryptocurrencies have garnered much attention in recent years, both from the academic community and industry. One interesting aspect of cryptocurrencies is their explicit consideration of incentives at the protocol level. Understanding how…
The application of incentives, such as reward and punishment, is a frequently applied way for promoting cooperation among interacting individuals in structured populations. However, how to properly use the incentives is still a challenging…
Open-access blockchains based on proof-of-work protocols have gained tremendous popularity for their capabilities of providing decentralized tamper-proof ledgers and platforms for data-driven autonomous organization. Nevertheless, the…
When faced with a new customer, many factors contribute to an insurance firm's decision of what offer to make to that customer. In addition to the expected cost of providing the insurance, the firm must consider the other offers likely to…