128 citations · 417 across the 26 of their papers we have counts for
28 papers
Your Loss is My Gain: Low Stake Attacks on Liquid Staking Pools
Sen Yang, Aviv Yaish, Arthur Gervais +1
Permissionless Proof-of-Stake (PoS) economic security is predicated on the high cost of violating consensus safety or liveness. We show that liquid staking introduces additional ri…
Blockchain Amplification Attack
Taro Tsuchiya, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin +2
Strategies related to the blockchain concept of Extractable Value (MEV/BEV), such as arbitrage, front-, or back-running create strong economic incentives for network nodes to reduc…
What Drives the (In)stability of a Stablecoin?
Yujin Kwon, Kornrapat Pongmala, Kaihua Qin +5
In May 2022, an apparent speculative attack, followed by market panic, led to the precipitous downfall of UST, one of the most popular stablecoins at that time. However, UST is not…
Do you still need a manual smart contract audit?
Isaac David, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin +3
We investigate the feasibility of employing large language models (LLMs) for conducting the security audit of smart contracts, a traditionally time-consuming and costly process. Ou…
Blockchain Censorship
Anton Wahrstätter, Jens Ernstberger, Aviv Yaish +8
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 de…
Time to Bribe: Measuring Block Construction Market
Anton Wahrstätter, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin +2
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…
Enhancing Smart Contract Security Analysis with Execution Property Graphs
Kaihua Qin, Zhe Ye, Zhun Wang +5
Smart contract vulnerabilities have led to significant financial losses, with their increasing complexity rendering outright prevention of hacks increasingly challenging. This tren…
Blockchain Large Language Models
Yu Gai, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin +2
This paper presents a dynamic, real-time approach to detecting anomalous blockchain transactions. The proposed tool, BlockGPT, generates tracing representations of blockchain activ…
Smart Contract and DeFi Security Tools: Do They Meet the Needs of Practitioners?
Stefanos Chaliasos, Marcos Antonios Charalambous, Liyi Zhou +4
The growth of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem built on blockchain technology and smart contracts has led to an increased demand for secure and reliable smart contract de…
Mitigating Decentralized Finance Liquidations with Reversible Call Options
Kaihua Qin, Jens Ernstberger, Liyi Zhou +2
Liquidations in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) are both a blessing and a curse -- whereas liquidations prevent lenders from capital loss, they simultaneously lead to liquidation spir…
SoK: Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Attacks
Liyi Zhou, Xihan Xiong, Jens Ernstberger +7
Within just four years, the blockchain-based Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem has accumulated a peak total value locked (TVL) of more than 253 billion USD. This surge in DeFi…
On How Zero-Knowledge Proof Blockchain Mixers Improve, and Worsen User Privacy
Zhipeng Wang, Stefanos Chaliasos, Kaihua Qin +5
Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) mixers are one of the most widely-used blockchain privacy solutions, operating on top of smart contract-enabled blockchains. We find that ZKP mixers are…
Proof of Steak
Jon Crowcroft, Hamed Haddadi, Arthur Gervais +1
We introduce Proof-of-Steak (PoS) as a fundamental net-zero block generation technique, often accompanied by Non-Frangipane Tokens. Genesis cut is gradually heated and minted (usin…
Towards Private On-Chain Algorithmic Trading
Ceren Kocaoğullar, Arthur Gervais, Benjamin Livshits
While quantitative automation related to trading crypto-assets such as ERC-20 tokens has become relatively commonplace, with services such as 3Commas and Shrimpy offering user-frie…
A2MM: Mitigating Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges
Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Arthur Gervais
The asset trading volume on blockchain-based exchanges (DEX) increased substantially since the advent of Automated Market Makers (AMM). Yet, AMMs and their forks compete on the sam…
CeFi vs. DeFi -- Comparing Centralized to Decentralized Finance
Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Yaroslav Afonin +2
To non-experts, the traditional Centralized Finance (CeFi) ecosystem may seem obscure, because users are typically not aware of the underlying rules or agreements of financial asse…
An Empirical Study of DeFi Liquidations: Incentives, Risks, and Instabilities
Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Pablo Gamito +2
Financial speculators often seek to increase their potential gains with leverage. Debt is a popular form of leverage, and with over 39.88B USD of total value locked (TVL), the Dece…
On the Just-In-Time Discovery of Profit-Generating Transactions in DeFi Protocols
Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Antoine Cully +2
In this paper, we investigate two methods that allow us to automatically create profitable DeFi trades, one well-suited to arbitrage and the other applicable to more complicated se…
The Eye of Horus: Spotting and Analyzing Attacks on Ethereum Smart Contracts
Christof Ferreira Torres, Antonio Ken Iannillo, Arthur Gervais +1
In recent years, Ethereum gained tremendously in popularity, growing from a daily transaction average of 10K in January 2016 to an average of 500K in January 2020. Similarly, smart…
Quantifying Blockchain Extractable Value: How dark is the forest?
Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Arthur Gervais
Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have excelled at financial services. Yet, opportunistic traders extract monetary value from the mesh of decentralized finance (DeFi) smar…
AMR:Autonomous Coin Mixer with Privacy Preserving Reward Distribution
Duc V. Le, Arthur Gervais
It is well known that users on open blockchains are tracked by an industry providing services to governments, law enforcement, secret services, and alike. While most blockchains do…
High-Frequency Trading on Decentralized On-Chain Exchanges
Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Christof Ferreira Torres +2
Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) allow parties to participate in financial markets while retaining full custody of their funds. However, the transparency of blockchain-based DEX in c…
Applying Private Information Retrieval to Lightweight Bitcoin Clients
Kaihua Qin, Henryk Hadass, Arthur Gervais +1
Lightweight Bitcoin clients execute a Simple Payment Verification (SPV) protocol to verify the validity of transactions related to a particular user. Currently, lightweight clients…
FileBounty: Fair Data Exchange
Simon Janin, Kaihua Qin, Akaki Mamageishvili +1
Digital contents are typically sold online through centralized and custodian marketplaces, which requires the trading partners to trust a central entity. We present FileBounty, a f…