Related papers: MEV-ACE: Identity-Authenticated Fair Ordering for …
BlockChain (BC) immutability ensures BC resilience against modification or removal of the stored data. In large scale networks like the Internet of Things (IoT), however, this feature significantly increases BC storage size and raises…
A central question of the Ethereum ecosystem is where Maximal Extractable Value (MEV)revenue originates and to what extent it stems from harming unsuspecting users. It is acceptable if MEV arises from arbitrages between centralised and…
Deploying mobile edge computing (MEC) server in the mobile blockchain-enabled Internet of things (IoT) system is a promising approach to improve the system performance, however, it imposes a significant challenge on the trust of MEC server.…
This study explores the intricacies of waiting games, a novel dynamic that emerged with Ethereum's transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS)-based block proposer selection protocol. Within this PoS framework, validators acquire a distinct…
With the emergence of Miner Extractable Value (MEV), block construction markets on blockchains have evolved into a competitive arena. Following Ethereum's transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), the Proposer Builder…
Blockchains, and specifically smart contracts, have promised to create fair and transparent trading ecosystems. Unfortunately, we show that this promise has not been met. We document and quantify the widespread and rising deployment of…
Blockchain has empowered computer systems to be more secure using a distributed network. However, the current blockchain design suffers from fairness issues in transaction ordering. Miners are able to reorder transactions to generate…
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,…
Leader-based protocols for consensus, i.e., atomic broadcast, allow some processes to unilaterally affect the final order of transactions. This has become a problem for blockchain networks and decentralized finance because it facilitates…
In a decentralized environment, exchanging resources requires users to bargain until an agreement is found. Moreover, human agreements involve a combination of collaborative and selfish behavior and often induce circularity, complicating…
Decentralized finance revolutionizes traditional financial systems by leveraging blockchain technology to reduce trust. However, some vulnerabilities persist, notably front-running by malicious actors who exploit transaction information to…
The advent of decentralized trading markets introduces a number of new challenges for consensus protocols. In addition to the `usual' attacks -- a subset of the validators trying to prevent disagreement -- there is now the possibility of…
Blockchains face inherent limitations when communicating outside their own ecosystem, largely due to the Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) 3f+1 security model. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a promising mitigation because they allow…
Initially introduced to Ethereum via Flashbots' MEV-boost, Proposer-Builder Separation allows proposers to auction off blockspace to a market of transaction orderers, known as builders. PBS is currently available to validators through the…
This study investigates the rapid centralization of the Ethereum builder market under the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) architecture. We argue that existing research, by focusing predominantly on influential order flows, lacks a…
Electronic voting systems must balance public verifiability with voter privacy and coercion resistance. Existing cryptographic protocols typically achieve end-to-end verifiability by revealing vote distributions, relying on trusted clients,…
Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols have provable safety and liveness properties for static validator sets. In practice, however, the validator set changes over time, potentially eroding the protocol's security guarantees. For…
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…
The design of permissioned blockchains places an access control requirement for members to read, access, and write information over the blockchains. In this paper, we study a hierarchical scenario to include three types of participants:…
Currently, over 90% of Ethereum blocks are built using MEV-Boost, an auction that allows validators to sell their block-building power to builders who compete in an open English auction in each slot. Shortly after the merge, when MEV-Boost…