Related papers: BRC20 Snipping Attack
Validators in permissionless, large-scale blockchains, such as Ethereum, are typically payoff-maximizing, rational actors. Ethereum relies on in-protocol incentives, like rewards for correct and timely votes, to induce honest behavior and…
In blockchain sharding, $n$ processing nodes are divided into $s$ shards, and each shard processes transactions in parallel. A key challenge in such a system is to ensure system stability for any ``tractable'' pattern of generated…
Suppose that Alice plans to buy a physical good from Bob over a programmable Blockchain. Alice does not trust Bob, so she is not willing to pay before the good is delivered off-chain. Similarly, Bob does not trust Alice, so he is not…
There is growing interest in providing programmatic access to the value locked in Bitcoin, which famously offers limited programmability itself. Various approaches have been put forth in recent years, with the vast majority of proposed…
Cryptocurrencies, implemented with blockchain protocols, promise to become a global payment system if they can overcome performance limitations. Rapidly advancing architectures improve on latency and throughput, but most require all…
Motivated, in part, by the rise of permissionless systems such as Bitcoin where arbitrary nodes (whose identities are not known apriori) can join and leave at will, we extend established research in scalable Byzantine agreement to a more…
BIP70 is the Bitcoin payment protocol for communication between a merchant and a pseudonymous customer. McCorry et al. (FC~2016) showed that BIP70 is prone to refund attacks and proposed a fix that requires the customer to sign their refund…
This paper presents a novel adversary model specifically tailored to distributed systems, aiming to assess the security of blockchain networks. Building upon concepts such as adversarial assumptions, goals, and capabilities, our proposed…
Many distributed systems are subject to the Sybil attack, where an adversary subverts system operation by emulating behavior of multiple distinct nodes. Most recent work to address this problem leverages social networks to establish trust…
The purpose of this work was to perform a network analysis on the rapidly growing bitcoin transaction network. Using a web-socket API, we collected data on all transactions occurring during a six hour window. Sender and receiver addresses…
We present and validate a novel mathematical model of the blockchain mining process and use it to conduct an economic evaluation of the double-spend attack, which is fundamental to all blockchain systems. Our analysis focuses on the value…
Blockchain Sharding is a blockchain performance enhancement approach. By splitting a blockchain into several parallel-run committees (shards), it helps increase transaction throughput, reduce computational resources required, and increase…
We propose a smart contract that allows two mutually distrusting parties to transact any non-digital good or service by deploying a smart contract on a blockchain to act as escrow. The contract settles disputes by letting parties wager that…
Despite being under development for over 15 years, transaction throughput remains one of the key challenges confronting blockchains, which typically has a cap of a limited number of transactions per second. A fundamental factor limiting…
It has been known for some time that the Nakamoto consensus as implemented in the Bitcoin protocol is not totally aligned with the individual interests of the participants. More precisely, it has been shown that block withholding mining…
Recent advances have improved the throughput and latency of blockchains by processing transactions accessing different parts of the state concurrently. However, these systems are unable to concurrently process (a) transactions accessing the…
In many blockchains, e.g., Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), the primary representation used for wallet addresses is a hardly memorable 40-digit hexadecimal string. As a result, users often select addresses from their recent transaction…
We present the notion of multilevel slashing, where proof-of-stake blockchain validators can obtain gradual levels of assurance that a certain block is bound to be finalized in a global consensus procedure, unless an increasing and…
Recent Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) state machine replication (SMR) protocols increasingly focus on scalability to meet the requirements of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Validating the performance of scalable BFT protocol…
We introduce a new model of stochastic bandits with adversarial corruptions which aims to capture settings where most of the input follows a stochastic pattern but some fraction of it can be adversarially changed to trick the algorithm,…