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It has become cognitive inertia to employ cross-entropy loss function in classification related tasks. In the untargeted attacks on graph structure, the gradients derived from the attack objective are the attacker's basis for evaluating a…
Front-running attacks have been a major concern on the blockchain. Attackers launch front-running attacks by inserting additional transactions before upcoming victim transactions to manipulate victim transaction executions and make profits.…
Despite the popularity of Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) because of their use in wide areas of applications such as payment channels, atomic swaps, etc, their use in exchange is still questionable. This is because of its incentive…
A promising way to overcome the scalability limitations of the current blockchain is to use sharding, which is to split the transaction processing among multiple, smaller groups of nodes. A well-performed blockchain sharding system requires…
Credit allows a lender to loan out surplus capital to a borrower. In the traditional economy, credit bears the risk that the borrower may default on its debt, the lender hence requires upfront collateral from the borrower, plus interest fee…
The use of blockchains for automated and adversarial trading has become commonplace. However, due to the transparent nature of blockchains, an adversary is able to observe any pending, not-yet-mined transactions, along with their execution…
Relying on the fact that not all inputs require the same amount of computation to yield a confident prediction, multi-exit networks are gaining attention as a prominent approach for pushing the limits of efficient deployment. Multi-exit…
Blockchain protocols are inherently limited in transaction throughput and latency. Recent efforts to address performance and scale blockchains have focused on off-chain payment channels. While such channels can achieve low latency and high…
HotStuff is a state-of-the-art Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol. It can be pipelined to build large-scale blockchains. One of its variants called LibraBFT is adopted in Facebook's Libra blockchain. Although it is well known that…
The increasing sophistication of cyber threats demands novel approaches to characterize adversarial strategies, particularly those targeting critical infrastructure and IoT ecosystems. This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of attacker…
We analyze bribing attacks in Proof-of-Stake distributed ledgers from a game theoretic perspective. In bribing attacks, an adversary offers participants a reward in exchange for instructing them how to behave, with the goal of attacking the…
The exploitation of smart contract vulnerabilities in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has resulted in financial losses exceeding 3 billion US dollars. Existing defense mechanisms primarily focus on detecting and reacting to adversarial…
We develop a model of stable assets, including non-custodial stablecoins backed by cryptocurrencies. Such stablecoins are popular methods for bootstrapping price stability within public blockchain settings. We derive fundamental results…
GHOST, like the longest-chain protocol, is a chain selection protocol and its capability in resisting selfish mining attack has been validated in imperfect blockchains of Bitcoin and its variants (Bitcoin-like). This paper explores an…
A major challenge in blockchain sharding protocols is that more than 95% transactions are cross-shard. Not only those cross-shard transactions degrade the system throughput but also double the confirmation time, and exhaust an already…
While Ethereum smart contracts enabled a wide range of blockchain applications, they are extremely vulnerable to different forms of security attacks. Due to the fact that transactions to smart contracts commonly involve cryptocurrency…
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…
Since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 we have seen a great push towards public and private blockchains. In order to avoid fragmentation, a global network connecting all these blockchains is envisioned. Just like the Internet facilitates…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) took shape in 2020. An unprecedented amount of over 14 billion USD moved into DeFi projects offering trading, loans and insurance. But its growth has also drawn the attention of malicious actors. Many projects…
Billions of dollars are transacted through smart contracts, making vulnerabilities a major financial risk. One focus in the security arms race is on profitable vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Fuzzing is a key method for…