Related papers: Techreport: Evaluating Tor-based Location Privacy …
The rise of smart contract systems such as Ethereum has resulted in a proliferation of blockchain-based decentralized applications including applications that store and manage a wide range of data. Current smart contracts are designed to be…
The advent of Web 3.0, underpinned by blockchain technologies, promises to transform the internet's landscape by empowering individuals with decentralized control over their data. However, this evolution brings unique security challenges…
Centralized version control systems (VCS) are vital for software development but pose risks of data loss and ownership disputes. While blockchain offers a decentralized alternative, existing solutions are often hindered by high latency,…
The Tor network is the most prominent system for providing anonymous communication to web users, with a daily user base of 2 million users. However, since its inception, it has been constantly targeted by various traffic fingerprinting and…
Being a volunteer-run, distributed anonymity network, Tor is vulnerable to Sybil attacks. Little is known about real-world Sybils in the Tor network, and we lack practical tools and methods to expose Sybil attacks. In this work, we develop…
The core of many cryptocurrencies is the decentralised validation network operating on proof-of-work technology. In these systems, validation is done by so-called miners who can digitally sign blocks once they solve a computationally-hard…
Hardware wallets are designed to withstand malware attacks by isolating their private keys from the cyberspace, but they are vulnerable to the attacks that fake an address stored in a clipboard. To prevent such attacks, a hardware wallet…
Ethereum smart contracts are programs that can be collectively executed by a network of mutually untrusted nodes. Smart contracts handle and transfer assets of values, offering strong incentives for malicious attacks. Intrusion attacks are…
Permissionless blockchains promise to be resilient against censorship by a single entity. This suggests that deterministic rules, and not third-party actors, are responsible for deciding if a transaction is appended to the blockchain or…
Energy storage provides an effective way of shifting temporal energy demands and supplies, which enables significant cost reduction under time-of-use energy pricing plans. Despite its promising benefits, the cost of present energy storage…
While Ethereum smart contracts enabled a wide range of blockchain applications, they are extremely vulnerable to different forms of security attacks. Due to the fact that transactions to smart contracts commonly involve cryptocurrency…
Tor is currently the most popular network for anonymous Internet access. It critically relies on volunteer nodes called bridges for relaying Internet traffic when a user's ISP blocks connections to Tor. Unfortunately, current methods for…
Anonymous communication networks (ACNs) enable Internet browsing in a way that prevents the accessed content from being traced back to the user. This allows a high level of privacy, protecting individuals from being tracked by advertisers…
Network tomography plays a crucial role in network monitoring and management, where network topology serves as the fundamental basis for various tomography tasks including traffic matrix estimation and link performance inference. The…
This paper centers around a simple yet crucial question for everyday users: How should one choose their delegated validators within proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols, particularly in the context of Ethereum 2.0? This has been a long-overlooked…
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are increasingly deployed on distributed ledgers, yet systematic cross-platform evidence on their operational behavior remains limited. We present an empirical benchmarking study of three prominent…
Ethereum holds multiple billions of U.S. dollars in the form of Ether cryptocurrency and ERC-20 tokens, with millions of deployed smart contracts algorithmically operating these funds. Unsurprisingly, the security of Ethereum smart…
Data Availability Sampling (DAS), a central component of Ethereum's roadmap, enables clients to verify data availability without requiring any single client to download the entire dataset. DAS operates by having clients randomly retrieve…
Tor provides anonymity online by routing traffic through encrypted tunnels, called circuits, over paths of anonymizing relays. To enable users to connect to their selected destination servers without waiting for the circuit to be build, the…
Recently, blockchain technology has become a topic in the spotlight but also a hotbed of various cybercrimes. Among them, phishing scams on blockchain have been found making a notable amount of money, thus emerging as a serious threat to…