Related papers: Economic Security of VDF-Based Randomness Beacons:…
The Holy Grail of a decentralised stablecoin is achieved on rigorous mathematical frameworks, obtaining multiple advantageous proofs: stability, convergence, truthfulness, faithfulness, and malicious-security. These properties could only be…
Since the inception of permissionless blockchains with Bitcoin in 2008, it became apparent that their most well-suited use case is related to making the financial system and its advantages available to everyone seamlessly without depending…
This paper examines the economic and security implications of Proof-of-Stake (POS) designs, providing a survey of POS design choices and their underlying economic principles in prominent POS-blockchains. The paper argues that…
In this paper we show that, using only mild assumptions, previously proposed multidimensional blockchain fee markets are essentially optimal, even against worst-case adversaries. In particular, we show that the average welfare gap between…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models for probabilistic systems with non-deterministic behaviours. Long-run average rewards provide a mathematically elegant formalism for expressing long term performance. Value iteration (VI)…
We model incentive security in non-custodial stablecoins and derive conditions for participation in a stablecoin system across risk absorbers (vaults/CDPs) and holders of governance tokens. We apply option pricing theory to derive closed…
We show that when a third party, the adversary, steps into the two-party setting (agent and operator) of safely interruptible reinforcement learning, a trade-off has to be made between the probability of following the optimal policy in the…
This paper proposes a novel model-based approach to combine the quantitative dependability (safety, reliability, availability, maintainability and IT security) analysis and trade-off analysis. The proposed approach is called DPN…
We consider controller synthesis for stochastic and partially unknown environments in which safety is essential. Specifically, we abstract the problem as a Markov decision process in which the expected performance is measured using a cost…
Constrained reinforcement learning is to maximize the expected reward subject to constraints on utilities/costs. However, the training environment may not be the same as the test one, due to, e.g., modeling error, adversarial attack,…
Blockchains offer a decentralized and secure execution environment strong enough to host cryptocurrencies, but the state-replication model makes on-chain computation expensive. To avoid heavy on-chain workloads, systems like Truebit and…
Ensuring the safety and efficiency of AI systems is a central goal of modern research. Formal verification provides guarantees of neural network robustness, while early exits improve inference efficiency by enabling intermediate…
I study a repeated auction in which payments are made with a blockchain token created and initially owned by the auction designer. Unlike the ``virtual money'' previously examined in mechanism design, such tokens can be saved and traded…
We develop a general and practical framework to address the problem of the optimal design of dynamic fee mechanisms for multiple blockchain resources. Our framework allows to compute policies that optimally trade-off between adjusting…
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are a growing threat in network services. The frequency and intensity of DoS attacks are rapidly increasing day by day. The immense financial potential of the Cryptocurrency market is a prevalent target of…
Consider a set of parties invited to execute a protocol $\Pi$. The protocol will incur some cost to run while in the end (or at regular intervals), it will populate and update local tables that assign (virtual) rewards to participants. Each…
A safety verification task involves verifying a system against a desired safety property under certain assumptions about the environment. However, these environmental assumptions may occasionally be violated due to modeling errors or…
Emergency communications increasingly rely on remote visual inference for timely hazard detection under stringent bandwidth and latency constraints. However, conventional UDP-based visual delivery typically performs inference only after the…
Several real-world scenarios, such as remote control and sensing, are comprised of action and observation delays. The presence of delays degrades the performance of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, often to such an extent that…
This paper presents a complete formal specification, protocol description, and mathematical proof structure for Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) as originally defined in the Bitcoin whitepaper \cite{nakamoto2008}. In stark contrast to…