Related papers: Evasion Under Blockchain Sanctions
With the overall momentum of the blockchain industry, crypto-based crimes are becoming more and more prevalent. After committing a crime, the main goal of cybercriminals is to obfuscate the source of the illicit funds in order to convert…
Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute payment transactions securely, but their performance is limited by the need for global consensus. Payment networks overcome this limitation through off-chain transactions. Instead of writing…
This paper introduces a fraud-deterrent access validation system for public blockchains, leveraging two complementary concepts: "Transaction Proximity", which measures the distance between wallets in the transaction graph, and "Easily…
Strategies related to the blockchain concept of Extractable Value (MEV/BEV), such as arbitrage, front-, or back-running create strong economic incentives for network nodes to reduce latency. Modified nodes, that minimize transaction…
The use of blockchains for automated and adversarial trading has become commonplace. However, due to the transparent nature of blockchains, an adversary is able to observe any pending, not-yet-mined transactions, along with their execution…
Blockchain offers a decentralized, immutable, transparent system of records. It offers a peer-to-peer network of nodes with no centralised governing entity making it unhackable and therefore, more secure than the traditional paper-based or…
While the literature features a number of proposals to defend against transaction manipulation attacks, existing proposals are still not integrated within large blockchains, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cardano. Instead, the user…
Within just four years, the blockchain-based Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem has accumulated a peak total value locked (TVL) of more than 253 billion USD. This surge in DeFi's popularity has, unfortunately, been accompanied by many…
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…
Traditional public blockchain systems typically had very limited transaction throughput because of the bottleneck of the consensus protocol itself. With recent advances in consensus technology, the performance limit has been greatly lifted,…
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…
Recently, several works conjectured the vulnerabilities of mainstream blockchains under several network attacks. All these attacks translate into showing that the assumptions of these blockchains can be violated in theory or under…
Anomaly detection tools play a role of paramount importance in protecting networks and systems from unforeseen attacks, usually by automatically recognizing and filtering out anomalous activities. Over the years, different approaches have…
Reentrancy is a well-known source of smart contract bugs on Ethereum, leading e.g. to double-spending vulnerabilities in DeFi applications. But less is known about this problem in other blockchains, which can have significantly different…
In blockchain, bribery is an inevitable problem since users with various goals can bribe miners by transferring cryptoassets. To alleviate the negative effects of such collusion, Ethereum blockchain implemented new transaction fee mechanism…
Conflicting transactions within blockchain networks not only pose performance challenges but also introduce security vulnerabilities, potentially facilitating malicious attacks. In this paper, we explore the impact of conflicting…
Centralized stablecoins such as USDT and USDC enforce sanctions through contract-layer blacklist functions. Yet on public blockchains, a freeze is still an ordinary transaction competing with the sanctioned party's transfer for priority. It…
Eclipse attacks isolate blockchain nodes by monopolizing their peer-to-peer connections. The attacks were extensively studied in Bitcoin (SP'15, SP'20, CCS'21, SP'23) and Monero (NDSS'25), but their practicality against Ethereum nodes…
Remote Procedure Call (RPC) services have become a primary gateway for users to access public blockchains. While they offer significant convenience, RPC services also introduce critical privacy challenges that remain insufficiently…
A major challenge in blockchain sharding protocols is that more than 95% transactions are cross-shard. Not only those cross-shard transactions degrade the system throughput but also double the confirmation time, and exhaust an already…