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We introduce the Clockwork Finance Framework (CFF), a general purpose, formal verification framework for mechanized reasoning about the economic security properties of composed decentralized-finance (DeFi) smart contracts. CFF features…
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…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) refers to a class of attacks to decentralized applications where the adversary profits by manipulating the ordering, inclusion, or exclusion of transactions in a blockchain. Decentralized Finance (DeFi)…
In the field of distributed consensus and blockchains, the synchronous communication model assumes that all messages between honest parties are delayed at most by a known constant $\Delta$. Recent literature establishes that the…
We analyze maximal extractable value in multiple concurrent proposer blockchains, where multiple blocks become data available before their final execution order is determined. This concurrency breaks the single builder assumption of…
Safety and robustness are two desired properties for any reinforcement learning algorithm. CMDPs can handle additional safety constraints and RMDPs can perform well under model uncertainties. In this paper, we propose to unite these two…
The presented article attempts to characterize the encryption dynamics of delayed dynamics based block ciphers, designed for the encryption of binary data. For such encryption algorithms, the encryption process relies on a coupling dynamics…
Many protocols in distributed computing rely on a source of randomness, usually called a random beacon, both for their applicability and security. This is especially true for proof-of-stake blockchain protocols in which the next miner or…
Optimistic rollups rely on fraud proofs -- interactive protocols executed on Ethereum to resolve conflicting claims about the rollup's state -- to scale Ethereum securely. To mitigate against potential censorship of protocol moves, fraud…
Certified safe control is a growing challenge in robotics, especially when performance and safety objectives must be concurrently achieved. In this work, we extend the barrier state (BaS) concept, recently proposed for safe stabilization of…
Although differential privacy (DP) is widely regarded as the de facto standard for data privacy, its implementation remains vulnerable to unfaithful execution by servers, particularly in distributed settings. In such cases, servers may…
Safety in stochastic control systems, which are subject to random noise with a known probability distribution, aims to compute policies that satisfy predefined operational constraints with high confidence throughout the uncertain evolution…
Large scale cryptocurrencies require the participation of millions of participants and support economic activity of billions of dollars, which has led to new lines of work in binary Byzantine Agreement (BBA) and consensus. The new work aims…
Owing to the meteoric rise in the usage of cryptocurrencies, there has been a widespread adaptation of traditional financial applications such as lending, borrowing, margin trading, and more, to the cryptocurrency realm. In some cases, the…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) refers to a wide class of economic attacks to public blockchains, where adversaries with the power to reorder, drop or insert transactions in a block can "extract" value from smart contracts. Empirical…
Systems in many safety-critical application domains are subject to certification requirements. In such a system, there are typically different applications providing functionalities that have varying degrees of criticality. Consequently,…
Resource allocation plays a central role in many networked systems such as smart grids, communication networks and urban transportation systems. In these systems, many constraints have physical meaning and having feasible allocation is…
This paper presents a new consensus protocol based on verifiable delay function. First, we introduce the concept of verifiable delay puzzle (VDP), which resembles the hashing puzzle used in the PoW mechanism but can only be solved…
A proof of the security of the Bitcoin protocol is made rigorous, and simplified in certain parts. A computational model in which an adversary can delay transmission of blocks by time $\Delta$ is considered. The protocol is generalized to…
Consensus mechanism is the core technology for blockchain to ensure that transactions are executed in sequence. It also determines the decentralization, security, and efficiency of blockchain. Existing mechanisms all have certain…