Related papers: BACKRUNNER: Mitigating Smart Contract Attacks in t…
Front-running attacks have been a major concern on the blockchain. Attackers launch front-running attacks by inserting additional transactions before upcoming victim transactions to manipulate victim transaction executions and make profits.…
Owing to the meteoric rise in the usage of cryptocurrencies, there has been a widespread adaptation of traditional financial applications such as lending, borrowing, margin trading, and more, to the cryptocurrency realm. In some cases, the…
Ethereum prospered the inception of a plethora of smart contract applications, ranging from gambling games to decentralized finance. However, Ethereum is also considered a highly adversarial environment, where vulnerable smart contracts…
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…
Ethereum smart contracts, which are autonomous decentralized applications on the blockchain that manage assets often exceeding millions of dollars, have become primary targets for cyberattacks. In 2023 alone, such vulnerabilities led to…
Price manipulation attack is one of the notorious threats in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, which allows attackers to exchange tokens at an extensively deviated price from the market. Existing efforts usually rely on reactive…
We consider front-running to be a course of action where an entity benefits from prior access to privileged market information about upcoming transactions and trades. Front-running has been an issue in financial instrument markets since the…
Smart contracts are self-executing programs that run on blockchains (e.g., Ethereum). 680 million US dollars worth of digital assets controlled by smart contracts have been hacked or stolen due to various security vulnerabilities in 2021.…
The exploitation of smart contract vulnerabilities in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has resulted in financial losses exceeding 3 billion US dollars. Existing defense mechanisms primarily focus on detecting and reacting to adversarial…
Smart contract security has progressed from vulnerability detection toward a broader research agenda that includes semantic reasoning, automated repair, adversarial robustness, and real-time exploit detection. This paper develops a…
Reentrancy, a notorious vulnerability in smart contracts, has led to millions of dollars in financial loss. However, current smart contract vulnerability detection tools suffer from a high false positive rate in identifying contracts with…
While catastrophic attacks on Ethereum persist, vulnerability research remains fixated on implementation-level smart contract bugs, creating a gap between academic understanding of vulnerabilities and the root causes of high-impact,…
Smart contract transactions associated with security attacks often exhibit distinct behavioral patterns compared with historical benign transactions before the attacking events. While many runtime monitoring and guarding mechanisms have…
Recently, a number of existing blockchain systems have witnessed major bugs and vulnerabilities within smart contracts. Although the literature features a number of proposals for securing smart contracts, these proposals mostly focus on…
Smart contracts are software programs featuring both traditional applications and distributed data storage on blockchains. Ethereum is a prominent blockchain platform with the support of smart contracts. The smart contracts act as…
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…
The blockchain technology has been used for recording state transitions of smart contracts - decentralized applications that can be invoked through external transactions. Smart contracts gained popularity and accrued hundreds of billions of…
The transaction ordering dependency of the smart contracts building decentralized exchanges (DEXes) allow for predatory trading strategies. In particular, front-running attacks present a constant risk for traders on DEXes. Whereas legal…
The Lightning Network, a payment channel network with a market cap of over 192M USD, is designed to resolve Bitcoin's scalability issues through fast off-chain transactions. There are multiple Lightning Network client implementations, all…
Smart contracts in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms are attractive targets for attacks as their vulnerabilities can lead to massive amounts of financial losses. Flash loan attacks, in particular, pose a major threat to DeFi protocols…