Related papers: Economic Security of VDF-Based Randomness Beacons:…
With the advancement of blockchain technology, chained Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols have been increasingly adopted in practical systems, making their performance a crucial aspect of the study. In this paper, we introduce a…
Many prominent smart-contract applications such as payment channels, auctions, and voting systems often involve a mechanism in which some party must respond to a challenge or appeal some action within a fixed time limit. This pattern of…
Certifying the safety or robustness of neural networks against input uncertainties and adversarial attacks is an emerging challenge in the area of safe machine learning and control. To provide such a guarantee, one must be able to bound the…
Low-speed internet can negatively affect incident response in a number of ways, including decreased teamwork, delayed detection, inefficient action, and elevated risk. Delayed data acquisition and processing may result from inadequate…
The security of Bitcoin protocols is deeply dependent on the incentives provided to miners, which come from a combination of block rewards and transaction fees. As Bitcoin experiences more halving events, the protocol reward converges to…
This paper presents an adversary model and a simulation framework specifically tailored for analyzing attacks on distributed systems composed of multiple distributed protocols, with a focus on assessing the security of blockchain networks.…
Deploying deep reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings requires developing algorithms that obey hard constraints during exploration. This paper contributes a first approach toward enforcing formal safety constraints on end-to-end…
Vertical federated learning (VFL) attracts increasing attention due to the emerging demands of multi-party collaborative modeling and concerns of privacy leakage. In the real VFL applications, usually only one or partial parties hold…
Time delays in feedback control loops can cause controllers to respond too late, and with excessively large corrective actions, leading to unsafe behavior (violation of state constraints) and controller infeasibility (violation of input…
Layer 2 systems have received increasing attention due to their potential to scale the throughput of L1 blockchains. To avoid the cost of putting data on chain, these systems increasingly turn to off-chain data availability solutions such…
When designing algorithms for finite-time-horizon episodic reinforcement learning problems, a common approach is to introduce a fictitious discount factor and use stationary policies for approximations. Empirically, it has been shown that…
Security system designers favor worst-case security metrics, such as those derived from differential privacy (DP), due to the strong guarantees they provide. On the downside, these guarantees result in a high penalty on the system's…
The rapid integration of inverter-based resources (IBRs) into power systems has identified frequency security challenges due to reduced inertia and increased load volatility. This paper proposes a robust power reserve decision-making…
Blockchain security is threatened by selfish mining, where a miner (operator) deviates from the protocol to increase their revenue. Selfish mining is exacerbated by adverse conditions: rushing (network propagation advantage for the selfish…
Competing firms that share a population of risky customers face a decentralized risk detection problem in which each firm holds fragmentary information whose aggregation would generate social value, but private incentives impede truthful…
This paper proposes a random network model for blockchains, a distributed hierarchical data structure of blocks that has found several applications in various industries. The model is parametric on two probability distribution functions…
Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have excelled at financial services. Yet, opportunistic traders extract monetary value from the mesh of decentralized finance (DeFi) smart contracts through so-called blockchain extractable value…
As the penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) increases, harnessing their flexibility becomes critical for power system operations. Virtual power plants (VPPs) offer a promising solution. However, most existing scheduling tools…
This paper addresses objectives tailored to the risk-averse optimization of accumulated rewards in Markov decision processes (MDPs). The studied objectives require maximizing the expected value of the accumulated rewards minus a penalty…
Implementing correct distributed systems is an error-prone task. Runtime Verification (RV) offers a lightweight formal method to improve reliability by monitoring system executions against correctness properties. However, applying RV in…