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Ethereum's scalability has been a major concern due to its limited transaction throughput and high fees. To address these limitations, Polygon has emerged as a sidechain solution that facilitates asset transfers between Ethereum and…
Price manipulation attack is one of the notorious threats in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, which allows attackers to exchange tokens at an extensively deviated price from the market. Existing efforts usually rely on reactive…
Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) are new types of marketplaces leveraging Blockchain technology. They allow users to trade assets with Automatic Market Makers (AMM), using funds provided by liquidity providers, removing the need for order…
The rapid growth of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) boosts the Ethereum ecosystem. At the same time, attacks towards DeFi applications (apps) are increasing. However, to the best of our knowledge, existing smart contract vulnerability…
In recent years, Ethereum gained tremendously in popularity, growing from a daily transaction average of 10K in January 2016 to an average of 500K in January 2020. Similarly, smart contracts began to carry more value, making them appealing…
In recent years, a more advanced form of phishing has arisen on Ethereum, surpassing early-stage, simple transaction phishing. This new form, which we refer to as payload-based transaction phishing (PTXPHISH), manipulates smart contract…
Sharding is a prominent technique for scaling blockchains. By dividing the network into smaller components known as shards, a sharded blockchain can process transactions in parallel without introducing inconsistencies through the…
Blockchain systems often rely on rationality assumptions for their security, expecting that nodes are motivated to maximize their profits. These systems thus design their protocols to incentivize nodes to execute the honest protocol but…
Due to its security, transparency, and flexibility in verifying virtual assets, blockchain has been identified as one of the key technologies for Metaverse. Unfortunately, blockchain-based Metaverse faces serious challenges such as massive…
We performed the first systematic study of a new attack on Ethereum that steals cryptocurrencies. The attack is due to the unprotected JSON-RPC endpoints existed in Ethereum nodes that could be exploited by attackers to transfer the Ether…
Blockchain systems are designed, built and operated in the presence of failures. There are two dominant failure models, namely crash fault and Byzantine fault. Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) protocols offer stronger security guarantees,…
Smart contracts in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms are attractive targets for attacks as their vulnerabilities can lead to massive amounts of financial losses. Flash loan attacks, in particular, pose a major threat to DeFi protocols…
Permissionless Proof-of-Stake (PoS) economic security is predicated on the high cost of violating consensus safety or liveness. We show that liquid staking introduces additional risks that are not captured by standard PoS economic security…
Traditional blockchains grant the miner of a block full control not only over which transactions but also their order. This constitutes a major flaw discovered with the introduction of decentralized finance and allows miners to perform MEV…
We quantify the threat of network adversaries to inducing \emph{network overload} through \emph{routing attacks}, where a subset of network nodes are hijacked by an adversary. We develop routing attacks on the hijacked nodes for two…
In this paper, we explore vulnerabilities and countermeasures of the recently proposed blockchain consensus based on proof-of-authority. The proof-of-work blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, have been shown both theoretically and…
Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…
Mechanisms for decentralized finance on blockchains suffer from various problems, including suboptimal price execution for users, latency, and a worse user experience compared to their centralized counterparts. Recently, off-chain…
Signed social networks are widely used to model the trust relationships among online users in security-sensitive systems such as cryptocurrency trading platforms, where trust prediction plays a critical role. In this paper, we investigate…
Billions of dollars have been lost due to vulnerabilities in smart contracts. To counteract this, researchers have proposed attack frontrunning protections designed to preempt malicious transactions by inserting "whitehat" transactions…