Related papers: Exploiting Liquidity Exhaustion Attacks in Intent-…
We consider the problem of being a cross-chain wealth management platform with deposits, redemptions and investment assets across multiple networks. We discuss the need for blockchain bridges to facilitates fund flows across platforms. We…
Cross-chain bridges play a vital role in enabling blockchain interoperability. However, due to the inherent design flaws and the enormous value they hold, they have become prime targets for hacker attacks. Existing detection methods show…
Payment channel networks provide a fast and scalable solution to relay funds, acting as a second layer to slower and less scalable blockchain protocols. In this paper, we present an accessible, low-cost attack in which the attacker…
The trustless nature of permissionless blockchains renders overcollateralization a key safety component relied upon by decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. Nonetheless, factors such as price volatility may undermine this mechanism. In…
Off-chain transaction networks can mitigate the scalability issues of today's trustless electronic cash systems such as Bitcoin. However, these peer-to-peer networks also introduce a new attack surface which is not well-understood today.…
The limit order book mechanism has been the core trading mechanism of the modern financial market. In the cryptocurrency market, centralized exchanges also adopt this limit order book mechanism and a centralized matching engine dynamically…
Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) allow parties to participate in financial markets while retaining full custody of their funds. However, the transparency of blockchain-based DEX in combination with the latency for transactions to be…
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…
The Lightning Network, a payment channel network with a market cap of over 192M USD, is designed to resolve Bitcoin's scalability issues through fast off-chain transactions. There are multiple Lightning Network client implementations, all…
Smart contracts power decentralized financial (DeFi) services but are vulnerable to security exploits that can lead to significant financial losses. Existing security measures often fail to adequately protect these contracts due to the…
We propose a new, more potent attack on decentralized exchanges. This attack leverages absolute commitments, which are commitments that can condition on the strategies made by other agents. This attack allows an adversary to charge monopoly…
Decentralized protocols claim immutable, rule-based execution, yet many embed emergency mechanisms such as chain-level freezes, protocol pauses, and account quarantines. These overrides are crucial for responding to exploits and systemic…
Our aim in this paper is to investigate the profitability of double-spending (DS) attacks that manipulate an a priori mined transaction in a blockchain. It was well understood that a successful DS attack is established when the proportion…
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…
Bribery is a perilous issue in the real world, especially in an economical aspect. This fraudulence is unavoidable, and more importantly, it is more difficult to trace in case smart contracts are utilized for bribing on a distributed public…
Although blockchains have become widely popular for their use in cryptocurrencies, they are now becoming pervasive as more traditional applications adopt blockchain to ensure data security. Despite being a secured network, blockchains have…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) in Ethereum is a financial ecosystem built on the blockchain that has locked over 200 billion USD until April 2022. All transaction information is transparent and open when transacting through the DeFi protocol,…
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…
The recent surge in federated data management applications has brought forth concerns about the security of underlying data and the consistency of replicas in the presence of malicious attacks. A prominent solution in this direction is to…
Within just four years, the blockchain-based Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem has accumulated a peak total value locked (TVL) of more than 253 billion USD. This surge in DeFi's popularity has, unfortunately, been accompanied by many…