Related papers: Eclipse Attacks on Ethereum's Peer-to-Peer Network
Ethereum is a decentralized Blockchain system that supports the execution of Turing-complete smart contracts. Although the security of the Ethereum ecosystem has been studied in the past, the network layer has been mostly neglected. We show…
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…
Clients of permissionless blockchain systems, like Bitcoin, rely on an underlying peer-to-peer network to send and receive transactions. It is critical that a client is connected to at least one honest peer, as otherwise the client can be…
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…
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…
With the promise of greater decentralization and sustainability, Ethereum transitioned from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The new consensus protocol introduces novel vulnerabilities that warrant…
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, use an approach called "metering" to assign a cost to smart contract execution, an approach which is designed to incentivise miners to operate the network and protect it against DoS attacks. In the…
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.…
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…
Lightning Network (LN) is a widely-used network of payment channels enabling faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions. In this paper, we outline three ways an attacker can steal funds from honest LN users. The attacks require dilating the…
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…
Ethereum holds multiple billions of U.S. dollars in the form of Ether cryptocurrency and ERC-20 tokens, with millions of deployed smart contracts algorithmically operating these funds. Unsurprisingly, the security of Ethereum smart…
This paper introduces a novel non-parametric change detection algorithm to identify eclipse attacks on a blockchain network; the non-parametric algorithm relies only on the empirical mean and variance of the dataset, making it highly…
Block-chain world is very dynamic and there is need for strong governance and underlying technology architecture to be robust to face challenges. This paper considers Ethereum, a leading block chain. We deep dive into the nature of this…
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…
Achieving the equilibrium between scalability, sustainability, and security while keeping decentralization has prevailed as the target solution for decentralized blockchain applications over the last years. Several approaches have been…
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…
The blockchain technology is believed by many to be a game changer in many application domains, especially financial applications. While the first generation of blockchain technology (i.e., Blockchain 1.0) is almost exclusively used for…
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…
Blockchain security is becoming increasingly relevant in today's cyberspace as it extends its influence in many industries. This paper focuses on protecting the lowest level layer in the blockchain, particularly the P2P network that allows…