Related papers: Exploiting Liquidity Exhaustion Attacks in Intent-…
Decentralized bridge applications are important software that connects various blockchains and facilitates cross-chain asset transfer in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem which currently operates in a multi-chain environment.…
The Internet is a critical resource in the day-to-day life of billions of users. To support the growing number of users and their increasing demands, operators have to continuously scale their network footprint -- e.g., by joining Internet…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…
With the development of Ethereum, numerous blockchains compatible with Ethereum's execution environment (i.e., Ethereum Virtual Machine, EVM) have emerged. Developers can leverage smart contracts to run various complex decentralized…
A *sore loser attack* in cross-blockchain commerce rises when one party decides to halt participation partway through, leaving other parties' assets locked up for a long duration. Although vulnerability to sore loser attacks cannot be…
This thesis proposes techniques aiming to make blockchain technologies and smart contract platforms practical by improving their scalability, latency, and privacy. This thesis starts by presenting the design and implementation of…
Bitcoin is a top-ranked cryptocurrency that has experienced huge growth and survived numerous attacks. The protocols making up Bitcoin must therefore accommodate the growth of the network and ensure security. Security of the Bitcoin network…
Modern targeted attacks such as Advanced Persistent Threats use multiple hosts as stepping stones and move laterally across them to gain deeper access to the network. However, existing defenses lack end-to-end information flow visibility…
Most permissionless blockchain networks run on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, which offer flexibility and decentralization at the expense of performance (e.g., network latency). Historically, this tradeoff has not been a bottleneck for most…
Path-aware networking architectures like SCION provide end-hosts with explicit control over inter-domain routing, while multipath transport protocols like MPTCP and MPQUIC enable the concurrent use of multiple paths. This combination…
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new networking architecture which aims to provide better decoupling between network control (control plane) and data forwarding functionalities (data plane). This separation introduces several…
In this paper we estimate the propagation of liquidity shocks through interbank markets when the information about the underlying credit network is incomplete. We show that techniques such as Maximum Entropy currently used to reconstruct…
We describe and analyze perishing mining, a novel block-withholding mining strategy that lures profit-driven miners away from doing useful work on the public chain by releasing block headers from a privately maintained chain. We then…
We investigate the vulnerability of a power transmission grid to load oscillation attacks. We demonstrate that an adversary with a relatively small amount of resources can launch a successful load oscillation attack to destabilize the grid.…
Large Language Models face an emerging and critical threat known as latency attacks. Because LLM inference is inherently expensive, even modest slowdowns can translate into substantial operating costs and severe availability risks.…
The Bitcoin Lightning network is a mechanism to enable fast and inexpensive off-chain Bitcoin transactions using peer-to-peer (P2P) channels between nodes that can also be composed into a routing path. Although the resulting possible…
The key cryptographic protocols used to secure the internet and financial transactions of today are all susceptible to attack by the development of a sufficiently large quantum computer. One particular area at risk are cryptocurrencies, a…
In decentralized finance (DeFi), lenders can offer flash loans to borrowers, i.e., loans that are only valid within a blockchain transaction and must be repaid with fees by the end of that transaction. Unlike normal loans, flash loans allow…
The last level cache is vulnerable to timing based side channel attacks because it is shared by the attacker and the victim processes even if they are located on different cores. These timing attacks evict the victim cache lines using small…
Only when understanding hackers' tactics, can we thwart their attacks. With this spirit, this paper studies how hackers can effectively launch the so-called 'targeted node attacks', in which iterative attacks are staged on a network, and in…