Related papers: Eclipse Attacks on Ethereum's Peer-to-Peer Network
Ethereum is currently the second largest blockchain by market capitalization and a popular platform for cryptocurrencies. As it has grown, the high value present and the anonymity afforded by the technology have led Ethereum to become a…
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a decentralized computing engine. It enables the Ethereum blockchain to execute smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps). The increasing adoption of Ethereum sparked the rise of phishing…
Blockchain protocols incentivize participation through monetary rewards, assuming rational actors behave honestly to maximize their gains. However, attackers may attempt to harm others even at personal cost. These denial of profit attacks…
Existing permissioned blockchain systems designate a fixed and explicit group of committee nodes to run a consensus protocol that confirms the same sequence of blocks among all nodes. Unfortunately, when such a permissioned blockchain runs…
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…
User transactions on Ethereum's peer-to-peer network are at risk of being attacked. The smart contracts building decentralized finance (DeFi) have introduced a new transaction ordering dependency to the Ethereum blockchain. As a result,…
In recent years, a more advanced form of phishing has arisen on Ethereum, surpassing early-stage, simple transaction phishing. This new form, which we refer to as payload-based transaction phishing (PTXPHISH), manipulates smart contract…
Blockchain technology has evolved through many changes and modifications, such as smart-contracts since its inception in 2008. The popularity of a blockchain system is due to the fact that it offers a significant security advantage over…
Reentrancy, a notorious vulnerability in smart contracts, has led to millions of dollars in financial loss. However, current smart contract vulnerability detection tools suffer from a high false positive rate in identifying contracts with…
In the age of Big Data, releasing protected sensitive data at a future point in time is critical for various applications. Such self-emerging data release requires the data to be protected until a prescribed data release time and be…
Ethereum is a permissionless blockchain ecosystem that supports execution of smart contracts, the key enablers of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFT). However, the expressiveness of Ethereum smart contracts is a…
Graph neural networks (GNNs) play a key role in learning representations from graph-structured data and are demonstrated to be useful in many applications. However, the GNN training pipeline has been shown to be vulnerable to node feature…
As the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and today's biggest decentralized platform that runs smart contracts, Ethereum has received much attention from both industry and academia. Nevertheless, there exist very few…
DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) encrypt DNS to guard user privacy by hiding DNS resolutions from passive adversaries. Yet, past attacks have shown that encrypted DNS is still sensitive to traffic analysis. As a consequence, RFC…
It is widely accepted that Ethereum mining is highly centralized. Nonetheless, centralization has been mostly characterized by exclusively looking at the influence that independent miners or mining pools can have over the network. Moreover,…
Ensuring security for highly dynamic peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has always been a challenge, especially for services like online transactions and smart devices. These networks experience high churn rates, making it difficult to maintain…
We present and validate a novel mathematical model of the blockchain mining process and use it to conduct an economic evaluation of the double-spend attack, which is fundamental to all blockchain systems. Our analysis focuses on the value…
Banking as an essential service can be hard to access in remote, rural regions where the network connectivity is intermittent. Although micro-banking has been made possible by SMS or USSD messages in some places, their security flaws and…
In this paper, we explore vulnerabilities and countermeasures of the recently proposed blockchain consensus based on proof-of-authority. The proof-of-work blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, have been shown both theoretically and…
We quantify the threat of network adversaries to inducing \emph{network overload} through \emph{routing attacks}, where a subset of network nodes are hijacked by an adversary. We develop routing attacks on the hijacked nodes for two…