Related papers: Evasion Under Blockchain Sanctions
This paper investigates the impact of sanctions on Tornado Cash, a smart contract protocol designed to enhance transaction privacy. Following the U.S. Department of the Treasury's sanctions against Tornado Cash in August 2022, platform…
Permissionless blockchains promise to be resilient against censorship by a single entity. This suggests that deterministic rules, and not third-party actors, are responsible for deciding if a transaction is appended to the blockchain or…
Tornado Cash is a decentralised mixer that uses cryptographic techniques to sever the on-chain trail between depositors and withdrawers. In practice, however, its anonymity can be undermined by user behaviour and operational quirks. We…
Regulatory authorities aim to tackle illegal activities by targeting the economic incentives that drive such behaviour. This is typically achieved through the implementation of financial sanctions against the entities involved in 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…
In this paper, we identify a new form of attack, called the Balance attack, against proof-of-work blockchain systems. The novelty of this attack consists of delaying network communications between multiple subgroups of nodes with balanced…
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…
The untraceability of transactions facilitated by Ethereum mixing services like Tornado Cash poses significant challenges to blockchain security and financial regulation. Existing methods for correlating mixing accounts suffer from limited…
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.…
The decentralization, redundancy, and pseudo-anonymity features have made permission-less public blockchain platforms attractive for adoption as technology platforms for cryptocurrencies. However, such adoption has enabled cybercriminals to…
The number of blockchain users has tremendously grown in recent years. As an unintended consequence, e-crime transactions on blockchains has been on the rise. Consequently, public blockchains have become a hotbed of research for developing…
Cross-chain bridges are a type of middleware for blockchain interoperability that supports the transfer of assets and data across blockchains. However, several of these bridges have vulnerabilities that have caused 3.2 billion dollars in…
Recently, blockchain technology has become a topic in the spotlight but also a hotbed of various cybercrimes. Among them, phishing scams on blockchain have been found making a notable amount of money, thus emerging as a serious threat to…
Ethereum is a permissionless blockchain ecosystem that supports execution of smart contracts, the key enablers of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFT). However, the expressiveness of Ethereum smart contracts is a…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) in Ethereum is a financial ecosystem built on the blockchain that has locked over 200 billion USD until April 2022. All transaction information is transparent and open when transacting through the DeFi protocol,…
Applications of blockchain technologies got a lot of attention in recent years. They exceed beyond exchanging value and being a substitute for fiat money and traditional banking system. Nevertheless, being able to exchange value on a…
Blockchain enables peer-to-peer transactions in cyberspace without a trusted third party. The rapid growth of Ethereum and smart contract blockchains generally calls for well-designed Transaction Fee Mechanisms (TFMs) to allocate limited…
Consensus protocols are currently the bottlenecks that prevent blockchain systems from scaling. However, we argue that transaction execution is also important to the performance and security of blockchains. In other words, there are ample…
The dark web has emerged as the state-of-the-art solution for enhanced anonymity. Just like a double-edged sword, it also inadvertently becomes the safety net and breeding ground for illicit activities. Among them, cryptocurrencies have…
As an emerging service framework built by combining cryptography, P2P network, consensus mechanism and innovative contract technology, blockchain has been widely used in digital finance, data sharing, message traceability and electronic…