185 citations · 265 across the 29 of their papers we have counts for
37 papers
On the Robustness of Gossip Protocols in Modern Blockchains
Wenting Li, Jannik Albrecht, Frederik Armknecht +1
Modern platforms such as Ethereum and Polkadot nowadays execute Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols over large validator committees, often comprising hundreds of nodes. At…
On Identifying Sound Conditions for Frontrunning Resistance
Sebastian Holler, Anna Piscitelli, Jannik Albrecht +3
Blockchains enable decentralized applications through smart contracts---interactive programs executed through consensus. However, the inherently asynchronous nature of blockchain t…
"They don't care about this": A Systematic Study of TEE Build Reproducibility in the Wild
Annika Wilde, Marco Gutfleisch, Felix Reichmann +4
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have become a cornerstone of modern cloud computing, providing strong confidentiality and integrity guarantees for both code and data. A criti…
On Securing the Software Development Lifecycle in IoT RISC-V Trusted Execution Environments
Annika Wilde, Samira Briongos, Claudio Soriente +1
RISC-V-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are gaining traction in the automotive and IoT sectors as a foundation for protecting sensitive computations. However, the suppor…
SseRex: Practical Symbolic Execution of Solana Smart Contracts
Tobias Cloosters, Pascal Winkler, Jens-Rene Giesen +2
Solana is rapidly gaining traction among smart contract developers and users. However, its growing adoption has been accompanied by a series of major security incidents, which have…
Mitigating Collusion in Proofs of Liabilities
Malcom Mohamed, Ghassan Karame
Cryptocurrency exchanges use proofs of liabilities (PoLs) to prove to their customers their liabilities committed on-chain, thereby enhancing their trust in the service. Unfortunat…
On the Effectiveness of Mempool-based Transaction Auditing
Jannik Albrecht, Ghassan Karame
While the literature features a number of proposals to defend against transaction manipulation attacks, existing proposals are still not integrated within large blockchains, such a…
On Abnormal Execution Timing of Conditional Jump Instructions
Annika Wilde, Samira Briongos, Claudio Soriente +1
An extensive line of work on modern computing architectures has shown that the execution time of instructions can (i) depend on the operand of the instruction or (ii) be influenced…
The Real Menace of Cloning Attacks on SGX Applications
Annika Wilde, Samira Briongos, Claudio Soriente +1
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are gaining popularity as an effective means to provide confidentiality in the cloud. TEEs, such as Intel SGX, suffer from so-called rollback…
Tuning for Two Adversaries: Enhancing the Robustness Against Transfer and Query-Based Attacks using Hyperparameter Tuning
Pascal Zimmer, Ghassan Karame
In this paper, we present the first detailed analysis of how training hyperparameters -- such as learning rate, weight decay, momentum, and batch size -- influence robustness again…
On Hyperparameters and Backdoor-Resistance in Horizontal Federated Learning
Simon Lachnit, Ghassan Karame
Horizontal Federated Learning (HFL) is particularly vulnerable to backdoor attacks as adversaries can easily manipulate both the training data and processes to execute sophisticate…
Targeted Physical Evasion Attacks in the Near-Infrared Domain
Pascal Zimmer, Simon Lachnit, Alexander Jan Zielinski +1
A number of attacks rely on infrared light sources or heat-absorbing material to imperceptibly fool systems into misinterpreting visual input in various image recognition applicati…
On the Robustness of Distributed Machine Learning against Transfer Attacks
Sébastien Andreina, Pascal Zimmer, Ghassan Karame
Although distributed machine learning (distributed ML) is gaining considerable attention in the community, prior works have independently looked at instances of distributed ML in e…
The Forking Way: When TEEs Meet Consensus
Annika Wilde, Tim Niklas Gruel, Claudio Soriente +1
An increasing number of distributed platforms combine Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) with blockchains. Indeed, many hail the combination of TEEs and blockchains a good "marr…
Practical Light Clients for Committee-Based Blockchains
Frederik Armknecht, Ghassan Karame, Malcom Mohamed +1
Light clients are gaining increasing attention in the literature since they obviate the need for users to set up dedicated blockchain full nodes. While the literature features a nu…
Defying the Odds: Solana's Unexpected Resilience in Spite of the Security Challenges Faced by Developers
Sébastien Andreina, Tobias Cloosters, Lucas Davi +5
Solana gained considerable attention as one of the most popular blockchain platforms for deploying decentralized applications. Compared to Ethereum, however, we observe a lack of r…
Larger-scale Nakamoto-style Blockchains Don't Necessarily Offer Better Security
Jannik Albrecht, Sebastien Andreina, Frederik Armknecht +3
Extensive research on Nakamoto-style consensus protocols has shown that network delays degrade the security of these protocols. Established results indicate that, perhaps surprisin…
No Forking Way: Detecting Cloning Attacks on Intel SGX Applications
Samira Briongos, Ghassan Karame, Claudio Soriente +1
Forking attacks against TEEs like Intel SGX can be carried out either by rolling back the application to a previous state, or by cloning the application and by partitioning its inp…
Fuzz on the Beach: Fuzzing Solana Smart Contracts
Sven Smolka, Jens-Rene Giesen, Pascal Winkler +4
Solana has quickly emerged as a popular platform for building decentralized applications (DApps), such as marketplaces for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). A key reason for its success…
EF/CF: High Performance Smart Contract Fuzzing for Exploit Generation
Michael Rodler, David Paaßen, Wenting Li +4
Smart contracts are increasingly being used to manage large numbers of high-value cryptocurrency accounts. There is a strong demand for automated, efficient, and comprehensive meth…
On the Storage Overhead of Proof-of-Work Blockchains
Alessandro Sforzin, Matteo Maso, Claudio Soriente +1
Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have long been criticized for their high computational and storage overhead. Unfortunately, while a number of proposals address the energ…
Estimating Patch Propagation Times across (Blockchain) Forks
Sebastien Andreina, Lorenzo Alluminio, Giorgia Azzurra Marson +1
The wide success of Bitcoin has led to a huge surge of alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins). Most altcoins essentially fork Bitcoin's code with minor modifications, such as the…
HCC: A Language-Independent Hardening Contract Compiler for Smart Contracts
Jens-Rene Giesen, Sebastien Andreina, Michael Rodler +2
Developing secure smart contracts remains a challenging task. Existing approaches are either impractical or leave the burden to developers for fixing bugs. In this paper, we propos…
MITOSIS: Practically Scaling Permissioned Blockchains
Giorgia Azzurra Marson, Sebastien Andreina, Lorenzo Alluminio +2
Scalability remains one of the biggest challenges to the adoption of permissioned blockchain technologies for large-scale deployments. Permissioned blockchains typically exhibit lo…