Related papers: Five Attacks on x402 Agentic Payment Protocol
Permissionless blockchains offer many advantages but also have significant limitations including high latency. This prevents their use in important scenarios such as retail payments, where merchants should approve payments fast. Prior works…
Ensuring security for highly dynamic peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has always been a challenge, especially for services like online transactions and smart devices. These networks experience high churn rates, making it difficult to maintain…
Cloud-application add-ons are microservices that extend the functionality of the core applications. Many application vendors have opened their APIs for third-party developers and created marketplaces for add-ons (also add-ins or apps). This…
Poorly designed smart contracts are particularly vulnerable, as they may allow attackers to exploit weaknesses and steal the virtual currency they manage. In this study, we train a model using unsupervised learning to identify…
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…
Autonomous AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) with structured function-calling interfaces enable real-time data retrieval, computation, and multi-step orchestration. However, the rapid growth of plugins, connectors, and…
Sharding, i.e. splitting the miners or validators to form and run several subchains in parallel, is known as one of the main solutions to the scalability problem of blockchains. The drawback is that as the number of miners expanding each…
A major limitation of open P2P networks is the lack of strong identities. This allows any agent to attack the system by creating multiple false personas, thereby disrupting the overlay network's connectivity and sabotaging its operation. In…
Leading language model (LM) providers like OpenAI and Anthropic allow customers to fine-tune frontier LMs for specific use cases. To prevent abuse, these providers apply filters to block fine-tuning on overtly harmful data. In this setting,…
In this paper, we consider the problem of cross-chain payment whereby customers of different escrows -- implemented by a bank or a blockchain smart contract -- successfully transfer digital assets without trusting each other. Prior to this…
Attacks on Internet routing are typically viewed through the lens of availability and confidentiality, assuming an adversary that either discards traffic or performs eavesdropping. Yet, a strategic adversary can use routing attacks to…
Recently, several works conjectured the vulnerabilities of mainstream blockchains under several network attacks. All these attacks translate into showing that the assumptions of these blockchains can be violated in theory or under…
Blockchain has become particularly popular due to its promise to support business-critical services in very different domains (e.g., retail, supply chains, healthcare). Blockchain systems rely on complex middleware, like Ethereum or…
Intent-based cross-chain bridges have emerged as an alternative to traditional interoperability protocols by allowing off-chain entities (\emph{solvers}) to immediately fulfill users' orders by fronting their own liquidity. While improving…
The proliferation of autonomous AI agents marks a paradigm shift toward complex, emergent multi-agent systems. This transition introduces systemic security risks, including control-flow hijacking and cascading failures, that traditional…
In this work, we reexamine the vulnerability of Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) to bribing attacks, where an adversary incentivizes blockchain miners to deliberately ignore a specific transaction to undermine the punishment mechanism of…
Peer to peer systems are the networks consisting of a group of nodes possible to be as wide as the Internet. These networks are required of evaluation mechanisms and distributed control and configurations, so each peer will be able to…
This paper presents a practical side-channel attack that identifies the social web service account of a visitor to an attacker's website. Our attack leverages the widely adopted user-blocking mechanism, abusing its inherent property that…
This article, a lightly adapted version of Perplexity's response to NIST/CAISI Request for Information 2025-0035, details our observations and recommendations concerning the security of frontier AI agents. These insights are informed by…
Cross-chain bridges are used to facilitate token and data exchanges across blockchains. Although bridges are becoming increasingly popular, they are still in their infancy and have been attacked multiple times recently, causing significant…