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Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, use an approach called "metering" to assign a cost to smart contract execution, an approach which is designed to incentivise miners to operate the network and protect it against DoS attacks. In the…
Cross-chain bridges, the critical infrastructure of the multi-chain ecosystem, have become a primary target for attackers, resulting in over $2.8 billion in losses due to subtle implementation flaws. Existing defenses, such as…
Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute payment transactions securely, but their performance is limited by the need for global consensus. Payment networks overcome this limitation through off-chain transactions. Instead of writing…
Options are fundamental to blockchain-based financial services, offering essential tools for risk management and price speculation, which enhance liquidity, flexibility, and market efficiency in decentralized finance (DeFi). Despite the…
Billions of dollars are lost every year in DeFi platforms by transactions exploiting business logic or accounting vulnerabilities. Existing defenses focus on static code analysis, public mempool screening, attacker contract detection, or…
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,…
Decentralized finance introduces new business models and use cases as part of digital finance. Restaking has recently emerged as a transformative mechanism in DeFi, promising extra yields but introducing complex and interconnected risks.…
Recently, several works conjectured the vulnerabilities of mainstream blockchains under several network attacks. All these attacks translate into showing that the assumptions of these blockchains can be violated in theory or under…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols are crypto projects developed on the blockchain to manage digital assets. Attacks on DeFi have been frequent and have resulted in losses exceeding \$77 billion. However, detection methods for malicious…
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…
Bitcoin's limited scripting capabilities and lack of native interoperability mechanisms have constrained its integration into the broader blockchain ecosystem, especially decentralized finance (DeFi) and multi-chain applications. This paper…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols are crypto projects developed on the blockchain to manage digital assets. Attacks on DeFi have been frequent and have resulted in losses exceeding $80 billion. Current tools detect and locate possible…
With the increasing popularity of blockchain, different blockchain platforms coexist in the ecosystem (e.g., Ethereum, BNB, EOSIO, etc.), which prompts the high demand for cross-chain communication. Cross-chain bridge is a specific type of…
State-of-the-art blockchain sharding solutions such as Monoxide, can cause severely imbalanced distribution of transaction (TX) workloads across all blockchain shards due to the deployment policy of their accounts. Imbalanced TX…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus forms the foundation of many modern blockchains striving for both high throughput and low latency. A growing bottleneck is transaction execution and validation on the critical path of consensus,…
Cryptocurrency has seen an explosive growth in recent years, thanks to the evolvement of blockchain technology and its economic ecosystem. Besides Bitcoin, thousands of cryptocurrencies have been distributed on blockchains, while hundreds…
The rapid adoption of Web3 infrastructures has led to a growing number of security incidents affecting cryptocurrency exchanges, custody services and blockchain-based platforms. While existing research predominantly focuses on…
Improving transaction throughput is one of the main challenges in decentralized payment systems. Attempts to improve transaction throughput in cryptocurrencies are usually a trade-off between throughput and security or introduce a central…
Smart contracts---stateful executable objects hosted on blockchains like Ethereum---carry billions of dollars worth of coins and cannot be updated once deployed. We present a new systematic characterization of a class of trace…
DEX, or decentralized exchange, is a prominent class of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on blockchains, attracting a total locked value worth tens of billions of USD today. This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study…