Related papers: Techreport: Evaluating Tor-based Location Privacy …
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…
Public key infrastructures (PKIs) are one of the main building blocks for securing communications over the Internet. Currently, PKIs are under the control of centralized authorities, which is problematic as evidenced by numerous incidents…
Tor is currently one of the more popular systems for anonymizing near real-time communications on the Internet. Recently, Borisov et al. proposed a denial of service based attack on Tor (and related systems) that significantly increases the…
Private blockchain networks are used by enterprises to manage decentralized processes without trusted mediators and without exposing their assets publicly on an open network like Ethereum. Yet external parties that cannot join such networks…
We performed the first systematic study of a new attack on Ethereum that steals cryptocurrencies. The attack is due to the unprotected JSON-RPC endpoints existed in Ethereum nodes that could be exploited by attackers to transfer the Ether…
Darknet technology such as Tor has been used by various threat actors for organising illegal activities and data exfiltration. As such, there is a case for organisations to block such traffic, or to try and identify when it is used and for…
Smart contracts are software programs featuring both traditional applications and distributed data storage on blockchains. Ethereum is a prominent blockchain platform with the support of smart contracts. The smart contracts act as…
In this work we show that Tor is vulnerable to app deanonymization attacks on Android devices through network traffic analysis. For this purpose, we describe a general methodology for performing an attack that allows to deanonymize the apps…
As one of the representative blockchain platforms, Ethereum has attracted lots of attacks. Due to the existed financial loss, there is a pressing need to perform timely investigation and detect more attack instances. Though multiple systems…
The beacon chain is the backbone of the Ethereum's evolution towards a proof-of-stake-based scalable network. Beacon clients are the applications implementing the services required to operate the beacon chain, namely validators, beacon…
Ethereum is currently the second largest blockchain by market capitalization and a popular platform for cryptocurrencies. As it has grown, the high value present and the anonymity afforded by the technology have led Ethereum to become a…
Tor provides anonymity to millions of users around the globe which has made it a valuable target for malicious actors. As a low-latency anonymity system, it is vulnerable to traffic correlation attacks from strong passive adversaries such…
Anonymous communication systems are subject to selective denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Selective DoS attacks lower anonymity as they force paths to be rebuilt multiple times to ensure delivery which increases the opportunity for more…
Ethereum has undergone a recent change called \textit{the Merge}, which made Ethereum a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, shifting closer to BFT consensus. Ethereum, which wished to keep the best of the two protocol designs (BFT and…
The increasing use of encrypted data within file storage and in network communications leaves investigators with many challenges. One of the most challenging is the Tor protocol, as its main focus is to protect the privacy of the user, in…
Validating a blockchain incurs heavy computation, communication, and storage costs. As a result, clients with limited resources, called light nodes, cannot verify transactions independently and must trust full nodes, making them vulnerable…
The privacy-preserving data aggregation is a critical problem for many applications where multiple parties need to collaborate with each other privately to arrive at certain results. Blockchain, as a database shared across the network,…
Digital identity verification often forces a privacy trade-off, where users must disclose sensitive personal data to prove simple eligibility criteria. As blockchain applications integrate with regulated environments, this over-disclosure…
Tor is an anonymity network used by millions of people every day to evade censorship and protect their browsing activity from privacy threats such as mass surveillance. Unfortunately, Tor has been shown to be vulnerable to website…
Bitcoin is a decentralized P2P digital currency in which coins are generated by a distributed set of miners and transaction are broadcasted via a peer-to-peer network. While Bitcoin provides some level of anonymity (or rather pseudonymity)…