Related papers: A Small Collusion is All You Need
Cryptocurrencies have garnered much attention in recent years, both from the academic community and industry. One interesting aspect of cryptocurrencies is their explicit consideration of incentives at the protocol level. Understanding how…
Node cooperation during packet forwarding operations is critically important for fair resource utilization in Community Wireless Mesh Networks (CoWMNs). In a CoWMN, node cooperation is achieved by using fairness protocols specifically…
In this paper we show that, using only mild assumptions, previously proposed multidimensional blockchain fee markets are essentially optimal, even against worst-case adversaries. In particular, we show that the average welfare gap between…
The classical theory of efficient allocations of an aggregate endowment in a pure-exchange economy has hitherto primarily focused on the Pareto-efficiency of allocations, under the implicit assumption that transfers between agents are…
The prospect of collusive agreements being stabilized via the use of pricing algorithms is widely discussed by antitrust experts and economists. However, the literature is often lacking the perspective of computer scientists, and seems to…
The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its…
We introduce the Clockwork Finance Framework (CFF), a general purpose, formal verification framework for mechanized reasoning about the economic security properties of composed decentralized-finance (DeFi) smart contracts. CFF features…
In cryptocurrencies, transaction fees are typically exclusively paid in the native platform currency. This restriction causes a wide range of challenges, such as deteriorated user experience, mandatory rent payments by decentralized…
Decentralized cryptocurrency systems, known as blockchains, have shown promise as infrastructure for mutually distrustful parties to agree on transactions safely. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchains and their variants suffer from the…
The rise of Ethereum and other blockchains that support smart contracts has led to the creation of decentralized exchanges (DEXs), such as Uniswap, Balancer, Curve, mStable, and SushiSwap, which enable agents to trade cryptocurrencies…
USDT, a stablecoin pegged to dollar, has become a preferred choice for money laundering due to its stability, anonymity, and ease of use. Notably, a new form of money laundering on stablecoins -- we refer to as crowdsourcing laundering --…
We study the incentives behind double-spend attacks on Nakamoto-style Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies. In these systems, miners are allowed to choose which transactions to reference with their block, and a common strategy for selecting…
Classical and contemporary distributed consensus protocols, may they be for binary agreement, state machine replication, or blockchain consensus, require all protocol participants in a peer-to-peer system to agree on exactly the same…
Max Consensus-based Auction (MCA) protocols are an elegant approach to establish conflict-free distributed allocations in a wide range of network utility maximization problems. A set of agents independently bid on a set of items, and…
In blockchain systems, fair transaction ordering is crucial for a trusted and regulation-compliant economic ecosystem. Unlike traditional State Machine Replication (SMR) systems, which focus solely on liveness and safety, blockchain systems…
In traditional public blockchain networks, transaction fees are only allocated to full nodes (i.e., miners). However, the lack of relay rewards reduces the willingness of light nodes to relay transactions, especially in the…
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a key paradigm for building Trustworthy AI systems by enabling privacy-preserving, decentralized model training. However, FL is highly susceptible to adversarial attacks that compromise model integrity…
Sharding enhances blockchain scalability by partitioning nodes into multiple groups for concurrent transaction processing. Configuring a large number of small shards usually helps improve transaction concurrency, but it also increases the…
Digital signatures are crucial for securing Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) transactions. Like most forms of digital currencies, CBDC solutions rely on signatures for transaction authenticity and integrity, leading to major issues…
The problem of obtaining secret commitments from multiple parties and revealing them after a certain time is useful for sealed-bid auctions, games, and other applications. Existing solutions, dating back to Rivest, Shamir and Wagner, either…