Related papers: Your Loss is My Gain: Low Stake Attacks on Liquid …
The LMD GHOST consensus protocol is a critical component of proof-of-stake Ethereum. In its current form, this protocol is brittle, as evidenced by recent attacks and patching attempts. We propose Goldfish, a new protocol that satisfies key…
As restaking protocols gain adoption across blockchain ecosystems, there is a need for Actively Validated Services (AVSs) to span multiple Shared Security Providers (SSPs). This leads to stake fragmentation which introduces new…
As cryptographic tokens and altcoins are increasingly being built to serve as utility tokens, the notion of useful work consensus protocols, as opposed to number-crunching PoW consensus, is becoming ever more important. In such contexts,…
Blockchain technology is a breakthrough in changing the ways of business and organization operations, in which the consensus problem is challenging with practical constraints, such as computational power and consensus standard. In this…
We propose a framework for threshold cryptosystems under a permissionless-economic model in which the participants are rational profit-maximizing entities. To date, threshold cryptosystems have been considered under permissioned settings…
Cryptocurrencies are poised to revolutionize the modern economy by democratizing commerce. These currencies operate on top of blockchain-based distributed ledgers. Existing permissionless blockchain-based protocols offer unparalleled…
Mobile service providers (MSPs) are particularly vulnerable to roaming frauds, especially ones that exploit the long delay in the data exchange process of the contemporary roaming management systems, causing multi-billion dollars loss each…
The security of many Proof-of-Stake (PoS) payment systems relies on quorum-based State Machine Replication (SMR) protocols. While classical analyses assume purely Byzantine faults, real-world systems must tolerate both arbitrary failures…
We study Nash-dynamics in the context of blockchain protocols. We introduce a formal model, within which one can assess whether the Nash dynamics can lead utility-maximizing participants to defect from the "honest" protocol operation,…
Blockchain, the technology behind the popular Bitcoin, is considered a "security by design" system as it is meant to create security among a group of distrustful parties yet without a central trusted authority. The security of blockchain…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom…
Blockchain technology has been gaining great interest from a variety of sectors, including healthcare, supply chain and cryptocurrencies. However, Blockchain suffers from its limited ability to scale (i.e. low throughput and high latency).…
Open-access blockchains based on proof-of-work protocols have gained tremendous popularity for their capabilities of providing decentralized tamper-proof ledgers and platforms for data-driven autonomous organization. Nevertheless, the…
Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks.…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on custom datasets has become a standard approach for adapting these models to specific domains and applications. However, recent studies have shown that such fine-tuning can lead to significant…
This paper introduces a heterogeneous macroeconomic model of a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network to analyze the long-term centralizing effects of external traditional finance (TradFi) yields. We model a continuum of rational actors divided into…
Spamming attacks are a serious concern for consensus protocols, as witnessed by recent outages of a major blockchain, Solana. They cause congestion and excessive message delays in a real network due to its bandwidth constraints. In…
Cryptocurrency exchanges use proofs of liabilities (PoLs) to prove to their customers their liabilities committed on-chain, thereby enhancing their trust in the service. Unfortunately, a close examination of currently deployed and academic…
We study the risks of validator reuse across multiple services in a restaking protocol. We characterize the robust security of a restaking network as a function of the buffer between the costs and profits from attacks. For example, our…