Related papers: Exploiting Liquidity Exhaustion Attacks in Intent-…
Payment channels networks drastically increase the throughput and hence scalability of blockchains by performing transactions \emph{off-chain}. In an off-chain payment, parties deposit coins in a channel and then perform transactions…
We study selfish mining attacks in longest-chain blockchains like Bitcoin, but where the proof of work is replaced with efficient proof systems -- like proofs of stake or proofs of space -- and consider the problem of computing an optimal…
The Ethereum blockchain platform supports the execution of decentralised applications or smart contracts. These typically hold and transfer digital currency to other parties on the platform; however, they have been subject to numerous…
The Lightning Network is the most widely used payment channel network (PCN) to date, making it an attractive attack surface for adversaries. In this paper, we analyze the Lightning Network's PCN topology and investigate its resilience…
Credit exposure in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is often implicit and token-mediated, creating a dense web of inter-protocol dependencies. Thus, a shock to one token may result in significant and uncontrolled contagion effects. As the DeFi…
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become widely used in the field of graph mining. However, these networks are vulnerable to structural perturbations. While many research efforts have focused on analyzing vulnerability through poisoning…
The Ripple credit network has emerged as a payment backbone with key advantages for financial institutions and the remittance industry. Its path-based IOweYou (IOU) settlements across different (crypto)currencies conceptually distinguishes…
A recent discovery of a new class of microarchitectural attacks called Spectre picked up the attention of the security community as these attacks can circumvent many traditional mechanisms of defense. One of the attacks---Bounds Check…
With the promise of greater decentralization and sustainability, Ethereum transitioned from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The new consensus protocol introduces novel vulnerabilities that warrant…
We propose a new coded blockchain scheme suitable for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) network. In contrast to existing works for coded blockchains, especially blockchain-of-things, the proposed scheme is more realistic, practical, and secure…
Decentralized lending protocols, exemplified by Aave V3, have transformed financial intermediation by enabling permissionless, multi-chain borrowing and lending without intermediaries. Despite managing over $10 billion in total value…
Most blockchains cannot hide the binary code of programs (i.e., smart contracts) running on them. To conceal proprietary business logic and to potentially deter attacks, many smart contracts are closed-source and employ layers of…
Since 2016, sharding has become an auspicious solution to tackle the scalability issue in legacy blockchain systems. Despite its potential to strongly boost the blockchain throughput, sharding comes with its own security issues. To ease the…
Exploitation techniques targeting intermediate (transit) network nodes in public and private networks have been theoretically known and empirically proven to work for quite some time. However, very little effort has been made to look into…
Recently, two attacks were presented against Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum: one where short-range reorganizations of the underlying consensus chain are used to increase individual validators' profits and delay consensus decisions, and one…
We provide methods to prevent line failures in the power grid caused by a newly revealed MAnipulation of Demand (MAD) attacks via an IoT botnet of high-wattage devices. In particular, we develop two algorithms named Securing Additional…
Sharding enhances blockchain scalability by dividing the network into shards, each managing specific unspent transaction outputs or accounts. As an introduced new transaction type, cross-shard transactions pose a critical challenge to the…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) enables many novel applications that were impossible in traditional finances. However, it also introduces new types of vulnerabilities. An example of such vulnerabilities is a composability bug between token…
Cross-chain swaps enable exchange of different assets that reside on different blockchains. Several protocols have been proposed for atomic cross-chain swaps. However, those protocols are not fault-tolerant, in the sense that if any party…
There is growing interest in providing programmatic access to the value locked in Bitcoin, which famously offers limited programmability itself. Various approaches have been put forth in recent years, with the vast majority of proposed…