Search: “blockchain”

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CategoryAll Ransomware 341 Malware 302 Vulnerability 236 Phishing & fraud 212 Policy & legal 186 Industry 177 Threat actor 163 Data breach 121 Exploit / PoC 89 Research 35 AI tools & infra 21 Advisory 14 AI research 9 AI safety & security 5

SeverityAll critical 476 high 624 medium 335 low 424 info 62

Function Name Is All You Need to Detect Blockchain Application Attacks

TxLucent detects blockchain dApp attacks from transaction function-name sequences using a transformer, achieving 1.56% false negatives without source code.

Researchers propose TxLucent, which maps transaction call traces to function name sequences and uses a transformer to detect blockchain application attacks without source code or handcrafted rules. Evaluated on 424 real-world incidents with 14,611 attack transactions, it achieves a 1.56% false negative rate and an estimated 0.0017% false positive rate across over 500 million Ethereum transactions. Average analysis time of 24.90 milliseconds supports real-time detection on popular blockchains.

arXiv cs.CRSep 11, 00:43 UTC · 6d agoResearch1

PDoS: A Profitable Denial-of-Service Attack against Proof-of-Work Blockchain Liveness

PDoS attack disrupts Proof-of-Work blockchain liveness profitably by combining miner deterrence signals with parasitic revenue extraction from victim pools.

PDoS is a hybrid incentive-driven denial-of-service attack that combines block header signal deterrence with parasitic revenue extraction from a victim pool's share-reward mechanism. By subsidizing attack costs through the victim pool, it lowers the hash-power threshold required to induce rational miners to shut down, unlike prior attacks such as BDoS that demand sustained attacker losses. The authors show a counterintuitive result: in high-fee or high-MEV environments, higher block value increases the attacker's parasitic revenue and can push the attack past break-even into a self-sustaining or even profitable regime. PDoS is claimed as the first attack demonstrating that disrupting PoW blockchain liveness can be economically self-sustaining.

arXiv cs.CRSep 11, 05:16 UTC · 6d agoResearch

Detecting Logic Vulnerabilities Across the Contract and Device Layers of Blockchain-Enabled IoT With Multi-Agent Heterogeneous Graph Attention

MA-HGAT framework detects logic vulnerabilities across smart contract and IoT device firmware layers using multi-agent heterogeneous graph attention.

Researchers extend MA-HGAT into a cross-layer multi-agent heterogeneous graph attention framework that models smart contracts, firmware artifacts, device fleets, and transaction streams for blockchain-enabled IoT security. A four-role, nine-relation schema supports graph-, link-, and node-level detection tasks, while a gateway-cloud partition enables lightweight edge inference on resource-constrained devices.

arXiv cs.CRSep 16, 09:08 UTC · 1d agoResearch

Post-quantum migration gets harder when every user holds a key

Quantus CEO Christopher Smith discusses post-quantum migration pitfalls, including oversized keys breaking IPsec, SSH and TLS, and hard-to-migrate blockchain user keys.

Quantus CEO Christopher Smith describes post-quantum migration findings from banks and hospitals, including forgotten default passwords, orphaned admin keys held by former employees and hidden password hashes on user devices. Larger post-quantum keys and signatures break size assumptions in IPsec, SSH, TLS and libp2p, while migrating blockchain user keys remains hard because every user must act. He argues boards should fund quantum migration like insurance by quantifying cryptographic failure risk, and warns a silent quantum break would be difficult to detect from outside.

Help Net SecurityAug 12, 00:00 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Research

Fluid Notarization: Verifiable Evolution of Concurrently Edited Structured Documents

Fluid Notarization anchors delta-CRDT change graphs on blockchain, providing verifiable provenance for concurrently edited documents, demonstrated on collaborative electronic health records.

The paper introduces Fluid Notarization, a paradigm that notarizes the evolution of collaboratively edited structured documents rather than isolated snapshots. It builds on Melda, a JSON-native delta-CRDT representing changes as compact content-addressed deltas linked by causal dependencies, with blockchain notarization reduced to recording identifiers of evolution artifacts while synchronization, reconstruction, and conflict resolution remain off-chain. The architecture combines deterministic CRDT convergence with independently auditable proof-of-existence, provenance, and publication evidence, validated through a prototype based on collaboratively edited electronic health records.

arXiv cs.CRSep 16, 16:20 UTC · 19h agoResearch

There Is No Patch Tuesday on the Blockchain: Why Solidity Developers Need Fusion-Grade AppSec Before They Deploy

Checkmarx argues Solidity developers need pre-deployment AppSec because disclosure-to-weaponization time has collapsed from 840 days to 1.6 days.

A Checkmarx write-up contrasts traditional software patch cycles with blockchain development, where there is no Patch Tuesday and fixes require on-chain upgrades. It cites stats that median disclosure-to-weaponization time collapsed from 840 days to 1.6 days and that 80% of exploitations now occur on or before disclosure day. The piece advocates fusion-grade application security for Solidity teams before contracts deploy.

CheckmarxAug 17, 15:04 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Research1

On Identifying Sound Conditions for Frontrunning Resistance

Researchers formally define smart-contract frontrunning resistance, showing 55% of 393 audited vulnerabilities escape state-of-the-art detection, and find two undisclosed Ethereum flaws.

The paper gives the first formal definition of frontrunning vulnerability for smart contracts, grounded in how honest users interact with contracts rather than contract code alone. In a large-scale study of 287 smart contract audits, 55% of the 393 vulnerabilities reported by leading auditors fall outside the scope of state-of-the-art dynamic detection criteria. The authors present a sound algorithm for synthesizing secure interaction conditions and apply it to real-world contracts, uncovering previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in two Ethereum contracts.

arXiv cs.CRSep 10, 13:35 UTC · 6d agoResearch

You've Got a BUD in Me: Authenticated Reads from Per-Block Write Logs

Researchers propose BUD, per-block write-log digests enabling blockchain validators to serve historical membership and exclusion proofs far cheaper than state-wide tries.

The paper introduces Block Update Digests (BUD), which authenticate each block's write log with predecessor pointers, plus a SuperBUD and exponential hierarchy to turn long unchanged intervals into short proofs. Soundness against adversarial provers and up to f Byzantine validators is proven under archive, attestation, and committee evidence assumptions. Benchmarks show a 50x state-size increase raises the base-BUD path only 1.24x versus 3.1x for in-memory and 69.5x for disk-backed Merkle Patricia tries, with read payloads below 800 bytes and p99 warm verification at 146 microseconds.

arXiv cs.CRSep 10, 08:46 UTC · 7d agoResearch

Decentralized network congestion control for DAG-based distributed ledger system

Researchers propose node-specific variable proof-of-work to curb transaction spamming in DAG-based distributed ledgers, proving a Nash equilibrium enforces prescribed node behavior.

The paper proposes a variable, behavior-based node-specific proof-of-work model for DAG-based distributed ledger networks, where congestion is mainly driven by transaction spamming rather than user growth or token launches. The model grants equal opportunity to stakeholders regardless of computational resources and penalizes nodes issuing more than a prescribed number of transactions. System behavior is modeled as a non-cooperative game over finite network resources, and the authors prove existence of a Nash equilibrium enforcing the prescribed behavior.

arXiv cs.CRSep 9, 09:48 UTC · 8d agoResearch

Guppy: Efficient Light Clients via Recursive Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Guppy lets blockchain light clients verify full state via recursive zero-knowledge proofs without validators maintaining state commitments, processing thousands of updates per second.

Guppy is a light-client protocol in which validators commit only to state updates while an off-chain, untrusted service secured by recursive zero-knowledge proofs maintains a verifiable Merkle tree over the full state. A hash-chain commitment moves validator signature verification out of the proving circuit, and a parallel recursive proving pipeline keeps latency growth logarithmic with throughput. A Plonky2-based implementation maintains a tree of size 2^30 while processing thousands of updates per second, adding only 2-4 seconds of latency without increasing block-construction complexity.

arXiv cs.CRSep 7, 20:41 UTC · 9d agoResearch

IntentFuzz: A Protocol-Aware Fuzzer for Automated Invariant Violation Detection in Intent-Based Cross-Chain Bridges

IntentFuzz protocol-aware fuzzer recovers bridge structure from unannotated Solidity and confirmed 22 invariant violations across 24 real-world deployments.

IntentFuzz formalizes a taxonomy separating invariant violations from settlement exposures in intent-based cross-chain bridges, then recovers a bridge's intent structure and deposit/fill function roles from unannotated Solidity source. It classified deposit and fill functions with 100% recall and 82% combined precision, and achieved 100% recall and precision on 23 planted-bug mutants. Across 24 real-world deployments it confirmed 17 genuine invariant violations with heuristic-only input generation, rising to 22 with its LLM-assisted tier, spanning eight vulnerable GitHub repositories with findings reproducible against public deployed bytecode.

arXiv cs.CRSep 11, 16:03 UTC · 5d agoResearch1

Heterogeneous Cross-Chain Transaction Tracing for Solana Bridges via Candidate-Set Selective Decision

SolTracer traces cross-chain transactions onto Solana bridges, improving open-world association F1 by 20.16% over the strongest baseline for illicit-fund tracing.

The paper formalizes four Solana-bound cross-chain transaction modes and proposes SolTracer, which maps heterogeneous execution semantics into a unified event space and uses candidate-set selective decision-making with abstention when valid targets are absent. In the challenging open-world setting with a 50% TA ratio, SolTracer improves F1 by 20.16% over the strongest baseline. An empirical study of real-world transfers examines count-value divergence across bridge mechanisms, cross-asset shifts, and decoupling between on-chain settlement and explorer visibility.

arXiv cs.CRSep 10, 11:43 UTC · 6d agoResearch

Are Unreachable Nodes Truly Safe? Fully Eclipsing Monero's P2P Network!

Researchers present Nyx and Moros, the first eclipse attacks against Monero nodes behind NATs, requiring no inbound access and demonstrated on mainnet.

The paper presents the first eclipse attacks tailored to unreachable Monero nodes operating behind NATs, requiring no inbound access to the victim. The attacks poison the peerlists of reachable nodes, which relay contamination to unreachable nodes' whitelists, then exploit Monero's outbound connection refresh logic to evict benign neighbors and monopolize all outbound connections. Nyx achieves a complete, persistent eclipse of long-running unreachable nodes in large-scale SEED Emulator simulations, while Moros stealthily eclipses newly joined nodes during bootstrapping and was demonstrated on the Monero mainnet. Countermeasures are proposed.

arXiv cs.CRSep 9, 14:43 UTC · 7d agoResearch

Meme Coin Factories: Uncovering Large-Scale Manipulations on pump.fun

Large-scale pump.fun study of 15 million meme coins identifies five manipulation classes including wash trading and a Market-Manipulation-as-a-Service ecosystem.

Researchers analyzed all 15 million coins launched on pump.fun over the last two years plus large random samples of transaction data, identifying five manipulation classes: wash trading, creator address obfuscation, coordinated sells, copycat coins, and social media manipulation. Strategic actors bypass the platform interface and implement strategies in a highly automated, low-latency way by interacting directly with the blockchain. The study also uncovers Market-Manipulation-as-a-Service (MMaaS) third-party tools that let non-technical users run these manipulations, and proposes mitigations for traders, pump.fun, and regulators.

arXiv cs.CRSep 9, 14:35 UTC · 7d agoResearch