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Existing training-time safety alignment techniques for large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Direct preference optimization (DPO), a widely deployed alignment method, exhibits limitations in both experimental…
Most flagship language models generate explicit reasoning chains, enabling inference-time scaling. However, producing these reasoning chains increases token usage (i.e., reasoning tokens), which in turn increases latency and costs. Our…
The gas fee, paid for inclusion in the blockchain, is analyzed in two parts. First, we consider how effort in terms of resources required to process and store a transaction turns into a gas limit, which, through a fee, comprised of the base…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) represents a pivotal challenge within the Ethereum ecosystem; it impacts the fairness, security, and efficiency of both Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2) networks. MEV arises when miners or validators manipulate…
The Ethereum blockchain utilizes the EIP-1559 algorithm to manage transaction inclusion and block assembly. However, EIP-1559 and much of the existing literature study this problem from a static perspective, focusing on price evolution…
We reveal six zero-day social engineering attacks in Ethereum, and subdivide them into two classes: Address Manipulation and Homograph. We demonstrate the attacks by embedding them in source codes of five popular smart contracts with…
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…
Mining is the important part of the blockchain used the proof of work (PoW) on its consensus, looking for the matching block through testing a number of hash calculations. In order to attract more hash computing power, the miner who finds…
Blockchains offer a decentralized and secure execution environment strong enough to host cryptocurrencies, but the state-replication model makes on-chain computation expensive. To avoid heavy on-chain workloads, systems like Truebit and…
Ethereum's current Gasper consensus mechanism, which combines the Latest Message Driven Greediest Heaviest Observed SubTree (LMD-GHOST) fork choice rule with the probabilistic Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG) finality overlay,…
Ethereum smart contracts are executable programs, deployed on a peer-to-peer network and executed in a consensus-based fashion. Their bytecode is public, immutable and once deployed to the blockchain, cannot be patched anymore. As smart…
Despite the success in various scenarios, blockchain systems, especially EVM-compatible ones that serially execute transactions, still face the significant challenge of limited throughput. Concurrent transaction execution is a promising…
Blockchains have block-size limits to ensure the entire cluster can keep up with the tip of the chain. These block-size limits are usually single-dimensional, but richer multidimensional constraints allow for greater throughput. The…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantee to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker's computational power does not exceed %50 of the network power. In this paper, we…
The Layer 2 Atomic Cross-Blockchain Function Calls protocol allows composable programming across Ethereum blockchains. It allows for inter-contract and inter-blockchain function calls that are both synchronous and atomic: if one part fails,…
Liquid staking has become the largest category of decentralized finance protocols in terms of total value locked. However, few studies exist on its implementation designs or underlying risks. The liquid staking protocols allow for earning…
In the Ethereum network, miners are incentivized to include transactions in a block depending on the gas price specified by the sender. The sender of a transaction therefore faces a trade-off between timely inclusion and cost of his…
Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 was recently implemented to transform Ethereum's transaction fee market. EIP-1559 utilizes an algorithmic update rule with a constant learning rate to estimate a base fee. The base fee reflects…
This work introduces a framework for evaluating onchain order flow auctions (OFAs), emphasizing the metric of price improvement. Utilizing a set of open-source tools, our methodology systematically attributes price improvements to specific…
We performed the first systematic study of a new attack on Ethereum that steals cryptocurrencies. The attack is due to the unprotected JSON-RPC endpoints existed in Ethereum nodes that could be exploited by attackers to transfer the Ether…