Issue #7
This Week in Security:
1. Paper Title: Please, do not decentralize the Internet with (permissionless) blockchains!
Summary: This work argues that is the open permissionless blockchain networks cannot become the substrate for a future decentralized Internet.
Authors: Pedro Garcia Lopez*, Alberto Montresor†, Anwitaman Datta‡,
Affiliations: * Universitat Rovira I Virgili, † University of Trento, and ‡ Nanyang Technological University.
2. Paper Title: Agent-Based Simulations of Blockchain protocols illustrated via Kadena's Chainweb.
Summary: Techniques that may be used to optimize peer-to-peer networking performance. They provide statistical estimates for the economic difficulty of an attack and how the presence of certain actors influences protocol-level statistics, such as the expected time to regain liveness.
Authors: Tarun Chitra*, Monica Quaintance†, Stuart Haber‡, and Will Martino†,
Affiliations: * Gauntlet Networks, † Kadena, and ‡ Stuart Haber Crypto.
3. Paper Title: Selfish Mining in Ethereum.
Summary: Closed-form formulas for the long term profitability of different selfish mining strategies in the Ethereum network.
Authors: Cyril Grunspan* and Ricardo Perez-Marco*,
Affiliations: * Pole Léonard de Vinci and IMJ-PRG.
4. Paper Title: Characterizing Code Clones in the Ethereum Smart Contract Ecosystem.
Summary: The first large-scale and systematic study to characterize the code reuse practice in the Ethereum smart contract ecosystem by analyzing 10 million contracts.
Authors: Ningyu He*, Lei Wu†, Haoyu Wang*, Yao Guo‡, and Xuxian Jiang†,
Affiliations: * Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, † PeckShield and ‡ Peking University.
5. Paper Title: Bug Searching in Smart Contract.
Summary: This work presents several common smart contract vulnerabilities and analyzed their possible scenarios and how they may be exploited.
Authors: Xiaotao Feng*, Qin Wang*, Xiaogang Zhu*, and Sheng Wen*,
Affiliations: * Swinburne University of Technology.
This Week in Privacy:
No papers.
This Week in Scalability:
No papers.
This Week in Proofs:
No papers.
This Week in Consensus Protocols:
No papers.
This Week in Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: Empirically Analyzing Ethereum's Gas Mechanism.
Summary: The first large scale empirical study to understand to what degree of gas costs are correctly aligned with observed computational costs in reality, by collecting and analyzing Tera-bytes worth of nanosecond-precision transaction execution traces.
Authors: Renlord Yang*†, Toby Murray*, Paul Rimba†, Udaya Parampalli*,
Affiliations: * University of Melbourne and † Data61/CSIRO.
2. Paper Title: Systemizing the Challenges of Auditing Blockchain-Based Assets.
Summary: Critically analyze the purported roadblocks to auditing blockchain firms and map them to traditional auditing practices, demonstrating that providing an audit opinion is challenging but not insurmountable.
Authors: Erica Pimentel*, Emilio Boulianne*, Shayan Eskandari*, and Jeremy Clark*.
Affiliations: * Concordia University.
3. Paper Title: A Unified Theory of the Blockchain Economy.
Summary: Multiple equilibria can arise in which collective deviation of miners (e.g., fork) can deteriorate the blockchain's efficiency and consumers' welfare.
Authors: Jun Aoyagi*,
Affiliations: * University of California Berkeley.
“Significant advancements and innovations in the blockchain space are constantly being achieved by academic researchers. We are committed to helping share and spread this research. In our newsletter, we aim to provide a list of publications that will help guide the community with the latest research in the blockchain space.
Unfortunately, a lot of this research is overlooked due to the massive numbers of papers being generated and the way they are being promoted and published. To tackle this issue, we’ve put together a categorized list of academic papers that can guide our subscribers and keep them up to date.”
Thanks for reading! If we missed anything, shoot us an email so that we can feature it in our next newsletter!
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