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Decentralized finance (DeFi) is revolutionizing the traditional centralized finance paradigm with its attractive features such as high availability, transparency, and tamper-proofing. However, attacks targeting DeFi services have severely…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Yepeng Ding , Arthur Gervais , Roger Wattenhofer , Hiroyuki Sato

AI agents integrated with Web3 offer autonomy and openness but raise security concerns as they interact with financial protocols and immutable smart contracts. This paper investigates the vulnerabilities of AI agents within blockchain-based…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Atharv Singh Patlan , Peiyao Sheng , S. Ashwin Hebbar , Prateek Mittal , Pramod Viswanath

Blockchain technology ensures secure and trustworthy data flow between multiple participants on the chain, but interoperability of on-chain and off-chain data has always been a difficult problem that needs to be solved. To solve the problem…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Xueying Zeng , Youquan Xian , Chunpei Li , Zhengdong Hu , Aoxiang Zhou , Peng Liu

Decentralized finance (DeFi) markets spread across Layer-1 (L1) and Layer-2 (L2) blockchains rely on arbitrage to keep prices aligned. Today most price gaps are closed against centralized exchanges (CEXes), whose deep liquidity and fast…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Burak Öz , Christof Ferreira Torres , Christoph Schlegel , Bruno Mazorra , Jonas Gebele , Filip Rezabek , Florian Matthes

Smart contract vulnerabilities have led to billions in losses, yet finding actionable exploits remains challenging. Traditional fuzzers rely on rigid heuristics and struggle with complex attacks, while human auditors are thorough but slow…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Arthur Gervais , Liyi Zhou

Blockchains, and specifically smart contracts, have promised to create fair and transparent trading ecosystems. Unfortunately, we show that this promise has not been met. We document and quantify the widespread and rising deployment of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-04-11 Philip Daian , Steven Goldfeder , Tyler Kell , Yunqi Li , Xueyuan Zhao , Iddo Bentov , Lorenz Breidenbach , Ari Juels

With the development of decentralized finance (DeFi), lending protocols have been increasingly proposed in the market. A comprehensive and in-depth evaluation of lending protocol is essential to the DeFi market participants. Due to the…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Shuai Yang , Wei Cui

While Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely used consensus mechanism for blockchain, it received harsh criticism due to its massive waste of energy for meaningless hash calculation. Some studies have introduced Proof-of-Stake to address…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Weilin Zheng , Xu Chen , Zibin Zheng , Xiapu Luo , Jiahui Cui

As of August 2022, blockchain-based assets boast a combined market capitalisation exceeding one trillion USD, among which the most prominent are the decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) tokens associated with decentralised finance…

General Economics · Economics 2025-05-08 Teng Andrea Xu , Jiahua Xu , Kristof Lommers

Recently emerging Decentralized Finance (DeFi) takes the promise of cryptocurrencies a step further, leveraging their decentralized networks to transform traditional financial products into trustless and transparent protocols that run…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-06-28 Bowen Liu , Pawel Szalachowski , Jianying Zhou

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,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Hadis Rezaei , Mojtaba Eshghie , Karl Anderesson , Francesco Palmieri

As smart contract platforms autonomously manage billions of dollars of capital, quantifying the portfolio risk that investors engender in these systems is increasingly important. Recent work illustrates that Proof of Stake (PoS) is…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2020-06-22 Tarun Chitra , Alex Evans

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) in recent years has revolutionized the AI landscape. However, the deployment model and usage of LLM services remain highly centralized, creating significant trust issues and costs for…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Hongbo Liu , Jiannong Cao , Bo Yang , Dongbin Bai , Yinfeng Cao , Xiaoming Shen , Yinan Zhang , Jinwen Liang , Shan Jiang , Mingjin Zhang

As AI systems become more capable and widely deployed as agents, ensuring their safe operation becomes critical. AI control offers one approach to mitigating the risk from untrusted AI agents by monitoring their actions and intervening or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Jon Kutasov , Chloe Loughridge , Yuqi Sun , Henry Sleight , Buck Shlegeris , Tyler Tracy , Joe Benton

The meteoric rise of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been accompanied by a plethora of frequent and often financially devastating attacks on its protocols There have been over 70 exploits of DeFi protocols, with the total of lost funds…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Daniel Perez , Lewis Gudgeon

Decentralised Finance (DeFi) applications constitute an entire financial ecosystem deployed on blockchains. Such applications are based on complex protocols and incentive mechanisms whose financial safety is hard to determine. Besides,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Massimo Bartoletti , James Chiang , Tommi Junttila , Alberto Lluch Lafuente , Massimiliano Mirelli , Andrea Vandin

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used for automated vulnerability repair (AVR), where repository-level reasoning enables them to inspect context and produce source-code patches. However, recent empirical results show that…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Simiao Liu , Fang Liu , Li Zhang , Yang Liu , Yinghao Zhu

Post-mortem analysis of compromised systems is a key aspect of cyber forensics, today a mostly manual, slow, and error-prone task. Agentic AI, i.e., LLM-powered agents, is a promising avenue for automation. However, applying such agents to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Stefano Fumero , Kai Huang , Matteo Boffa , Danilo Giordano , Marco Mellia , Dario Rossi

With the rapid development of blockchain technology in recent years, all kinds of blockchain-based applications have emerged. Among them, the decentralized finance (DeFi) is one of the most successful applications, which is regarded as the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Yinjie Zhao , Xin Kang , Tieyan Li , Cheng-Kang Chu , Haiguang Wang

Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a financial ecosystem without centralized controlling organization, has introduced a new paradigm for lending and borrowing. However, its capital efficiency remains constrained by the inability to effectively…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2025-03-26 Rik Ghosh , Arka Datta , Vidhi Aggarwal , Sudipan Sinha , Rajdeep Sengupta