Related papers: A Time-Bound Signature Scheme for Blockchains
Digital signatures are basic cryptographic tools to provide authentication and integrity in the emerging ubiquitous systems in which resource-constrained devices are expected to operate securely and efficiently. However, existing digital…
Currently, over 90% of Ethereum blocks are built using MEV-Boost, an auction that allows validators to sell their block-building power to builders who compete in an open English auction in each slot. Shortly after the merge, when MEV-Boost…
Traditional blockchain design gives miners or validators full control over transaction ordering, i.e., they can freely choose which transactions to include or exclude, as well as in which order. While not an issue initially, the emergence…
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,…
Multi-block MEV (MMEV) denotes the practice of securing k-consecutive blocks in an attempt at extracting surplus value by manipulating transaction ordering. Following the implementation of pro-poser/builder separation (PBS) on Ethereum,…
In this paper we discuss how conventional business contracts can be converted into smart contracts---their electronic equivalents that can be used to systematically monitor and enforce contractual rights, obligations and prohibitions at run…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) has emerged as a new frontier in the design of blockchain systems. In this paper, we propose making the MEV extraction rate as part of the protocol design space. Our aim is to leverage this parameter to…
This paper outlines a method aiming to increase the efficiency of proof-of-work based blockchains using a ticket-based approach. To avoid the limitation of serially adding one block at a time to a blockchain, multiple semi-independent…
MEV attacks have been an omnipresent evil in the blockchain world, an implicit tax that uninformed users pay for using the service. The problem arises from the miners' ability to reorder and insert arbitrary transactions in the blocks they…
Ethereum has undergone a recent change called \textit{the Merge}, which made Ethereum a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, shifting closer to BFT consensus. Ethereum, which wished to keep the best of the two protocol designs (BFT and…
As distributed ledgers, blockchains run consensus protocols which trade capacity for consistency, especially in non-ideal networks with incomplete connectivity and erroneous links. Existing studies on the tradeoff between capacity and…
The successive generations of consensus algorithms have progressively shifted the performance bottleneck of blockchains to the execution layer. While recent works address this by parallelizing transaction execution, they often overlook the…
A blockchain-based framework for distributed agile software testing life cycle is an innovative approach that uses blockchain technology to optimize the software testing process. Previously, various methods were employed to address…
Modern cryptocurrency systems, such as Ethereum, permit complex financial transactions through scripts called smart contracts. These smart contracts are executed many, many times, always without real concurrency. First, all smart contracts…
Modern blockchains guarantee that submitted transactions will be included eventually; a property formally known as liveness. But financial activity requires transactions to be included in a timely manner. Unfortunately, classical liveness…
Transaction Fee Mechanism Design studies auctions run by untrusted miners for transaction inclusion in a blockchain. Under previously-considered desiderata, an auction is considered `good' if, informally-speaking, each party (i.e., the…
The transition to post-quantum cryptography in blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is often framed as a purely cryptographic problem. In practice, it also presents significant economic and infrastructural challenges: in globally…
An effective method for suppressing intentional forks in a blockchain is the last-generated rule, which selects the most recent chain as the main chain in the event of a chain tie. This rule helps invalidate blocks that are withheld by…
This study explores the intricacies of waiting games, a novel dynamic that emerged with Ethereum's transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS)-based block proposer selection protocol. Within this PoS framework, validators acquire a distinct…
Rapid advancements in quantum computing and machine learning threaten the long-term security of classical blockchain systems, whose protection mechanisms largely rely on computational difficulties. In this study, we propose a quantum…