Related papers: Eclipse Attacks on Ethereum's Peer-to-Peer Network
Recently, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms on Ethereum are booming, and numerous traders are trying to capitalize on the opportunity for maximizing their benefits by launching front-running attacks and extracting Miner Extractable…
As one of the representative blockchain platforms, Ethereum has attracted lots of attacks. Due to the existed financial loss, there is a pressing need to perform timely investigation and detect more attack instances. Though multiple systems…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
Recently, two attacks were presented against Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum: one where short-range reorganizations of the underlying consensus chain are used to increase individual validators' profits and delay consensus decisions, and one…
Privacy and anonymity of validators, especially regarding IP address linkability, are essential to protect the Ethereum network from various attacks. Network-level attacks, such as DoS, can interrupt validators and affect the overall…
While catastrophic attacks on Ethereum persist, vulnerability research remains fixated on implementation-level smart contract bugs, creating a gap between academic understanding of vulnerabilities and the root causes of high-impact,…
The Lightning Network is a scaling solution for Bitcoin that promises to enable rapid and private payment processing. In Lightning, multi-hop payments are secured by utilizing Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) and encrypted on the…
As the most successful cryptocurrency to date, Bitcoin constitutes a target of choice for attackers. While many attack vectors have already been uncovered, one important vector has been left out though: attacking the currency via the…
Blockchain technologies underpin an expanding ecosystem of decentralized applications, financial systems, and infrastructure. However, the fundamental networking layer that sustains these systems, the peer-to-peer layer, of all but the top…
The Lightning Network (LN) has enjoyed rapid growth over recent years, and has become the most popular scaling solution for the Bitcoin blockchain. The security of the LN relies on the ability of the nodes to close a channel by settling…
Ethereum relies on a peer-to-peer overlay network to propagate information. The knowledge of Ethereum network topology holds the key to understanding Ethereum's security, availability, and user anonymity. From a measurement perspective, an…
In recent years, Ethereum gained tremendously in popularity, growing from a daily transaction average of 10K in January 2016 to an average of 500K in January 2020. Similarly, smart contracts began to carry more value, making them appealing…
Blockchains are decentralized and immutable databases that are shared among the nodes of the network. Although blockchains have attracted a great scale of attention in the recent years by disrupting the traditional financial systems, the…
The peer-to-peer (P2P) network of blockchain used to transport its transactions and blocks has a high impact on the efficiency and security of the system. The P2P network topologies of popular blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum,…
We present two attacks targeting the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum consensus protocol. The first attack suggests a fundamental conceptual incompatibility between PoS and the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST) fork choice paradigm…
In May 2023, the Ethereum blockchain experienced its first inactivity leak, a mechanism designed to reinstate chain finalization amid persistent network disruptions. This mechanism aims to reduce the voting power of validators who are…
Scalability is a common issue among the most used permissionless blockchains, and several approaches have been proposed accordingly. As Ethereum is set to be a solid foundation for a decentralized Internet web, the need for tackling…
Rollups have become the de facto scalability solution for Ethereum, securing more than $55B in assets. They achieve scale by executing transactions on a Layer 2 ledger, while periodically posting data and finalizing state on the Layer 1,…
Blockchain, as a distributed ledger technology, becomes increasingly popular, especially for enabling valuable cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. However, the blockchain software systems inevitably have many bugs. Although bugs in smart…
Many protocols for distributed and peer-to-peer systems have the feature that nodes will stop providing service for others once they have received a certain amount of service. Examples include BitTorent's unchoking policy, BAR Gossip's…