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Threshold cryptography has gained momentum in the last decades as a mechanism to protect long term secret keys. Rather than having a single secret key, this allows to distribute the ability to perform a cryptographic operation such as…
Motivated by the great success and adoption of Bitcoin, a number of cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum are becoming increasingly popular. Although existing blockchain-based cryptocurrency schemes can ensure reasonable…
A payment channel network is a blockchain-based overlay mechanism that allows parties to transact more efficiently than directly using the blockchain. These networks are composed of payment channels that carry transactions between pairs of…
Tendermint-core blockchains (e.g. Cosmos) are considered today one of the most viable alternatives for the highly energy consuming proof-of-work blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Their particularity is that they aim at offering…
As an emerging service for in-browser content delivery, peer-assisted delivery network (PDN) is reported to offload up to 95\% of bandwidth consumption for video streaming, significantly reducing the cost incurred by traditional CDN…
Establishing efficient and robust covert channels is crucial for secure communication within insecure network environments. With its inherent benefits of decentralization and anonymization, blockchain has gained considerable attention in…
The Lightning Network (LN) is a second-layer protocol for Bitcoin designed to enable fast and cost-efficient off-chain transactions. Channels in the LN can be closed either by mutual agreement or unilaterally through a forced closure, which…
With today's quantum processors venturing into regimes beyond the capabilities of classical devices [1-3], we face the challenge to verify that these devices perform as intended, even when we cannot check their results on classical…
This paper introduces TeleBTC, a fully decentralized protocol designed to wrap Bitcoin (BTC) on programmable blockchains. The creation of a decentralized wrapped BTC presents challenges due to the non-programmable nature of Bitcoin, making…
We hypothesize that peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay network nodes can be attractive to attackers due to their visibility, sustained uptime, and resource potential. Towards validating this hypothesis, we investigate the state of active…
We argue that the current POW based consensus algorithm of the Bitcoin network suffers from a fundamental economic discrepancy between the real world transaction (txn) costs incurred by miners and the wealth that is being transacted. Put…
Public blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin provide transparency and accountability, and have strong non-repudiation properties, but fall far short of enterprise privacy requirements for business processes. Consequently consortiums are…
Blockchain address poisoning is an emerging phishing attack that crafts "similar-looking" transfer records in the victim's transaction history, which aims to deceive victims and lure them into mistakenly transferring funds to the attacker.…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. Attempts to address this challenge include layer-2 solutions, such as Bitcoin's Lightning or Ethereum's…
Existing blockchain networks are often large-scale, requiring transactions to be synchronized across the entire network to reach consensus. On-chain computations can be prohibitively expensive, making many CPU-intensive computations…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network, launched in 2018, serves as a layer 2 scaling solution for Bitcoin. The Lightning Network allows users to establish channels between each other and subsequently exchange off-chain payments. Together, these…
Following the design of more efficient blockchain consensus algorithms, the execution layer has emerged as the new performance bottleneck of blockchains, especially under high contention. Current parallel execution frameworks either rely on…
The security of most existing cryptocurrencies is based on a concept called Proof-of-Work, in which users must solve a computationally hard cryptopuzzle to authorize transactions (`one unit of computation, one vote'). This leads to enormous…
Credit networks rely on decentralized, pairwise trust relationships (channels) to exchange money or goods. Credit networks arise naturally in many financial systems, including the recent construct of payment channel networks in blockchain…
Advancements in distributed ledger technologies are rapidly driving the rise of decentralized crowdsourcing systems on top of open smart contract platforms like Ethereum. While decentralized blockchain-based crowdsourcing provides numerous…