1. “Ethereum Proof-of-Stake under Scrutiny” by Ulysse Pavloff, Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou, and Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni

TLDR:

• Ethereum’s transition to Proof-of-Stake was a massive engineering feat widely celebrated within the crypto community.

• Nevertheless, as with any nascent distributed system, there are novel attacks that have emerged with The Merge, especially related to liveness, which is a core property blockchains must retain.

• We have covered nascent PoS attack types on the forum, notably Rebalancing Attacks. This paper introduces a new type of attack called a Bouncing attack, which is a form of liveness attack that can impact Ethereum’s uptime if exploited on-chain.

2. “Optimistic and Validity Rollups: Analysis and Comparison between Optimism and StarkNet” by Luca Donno

TLDR:

• Rollups have become critical for the scalability of public blockchains, but their architecture and implementation vary widely.

• This paper does a great job of providing the conceptual building blocks of the two most popular rollup types: zero-knowledge rollups and optimistic rollups.

• Beyond just the theoretical backbone of these rollup types, the author also discusses the two most popular implementations of each rollup type: STARKNET and Optimism.

3. “Robust Clustering of Ethereum Transactions Using Time Leakage from Fixed Nodes” by Congcong Yu, Chen Yang, Zheng Che, and Liehuang Zhu

TLDR:

• Address clustering has become a popular practice amongst crypto data enthusiasts because it enables a real-world entity, such as a crypto exchange, to be associated with a set of addresses on-chain.

• In turn, this enables on-chain observers to have a better understanding of the activities that these entities are engaging in, which can be useful in due-dilligence and market sentiment analysis.

• This paper discusses a new way to cluster addresses associated with an entity via a network-level privacy attack at the node level.

4. “SoK: Not Quite Water Under the Bridge: Review of Cross-Chain Bridge Hacks” by Sung-Shine Lee, Alexandr Murashkin, Martin Derka, and Jan Gorzny

TLDR:

• Cross-chain bridges have faced severe security issues over the past year, and bridge hacks are amongst the largest in the history of cryptoassets.

• This paper provides interesting conceptual background on cross-chain bridges and describes how they are typically constructed.

• The paper also sheds light on notable bridge hacks, such as the PolyNetwork hack, and discusses the challenges associated with securing cross-chain bridges.

Research collected and curated by @cipherix.

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not intended as legal, business, investment, or tax advice.

The Smart Contract Research Forum’s (SCRF) bold mission is to advance web3 through actionable research and knowledge-sharing. To this end, SCRF connects researchers and builders, sponsors projects, and constructs collaborative forums. SCRF’s community is an active, international network of academics, industry architects, and blockchain advocates.

1. “Ethereum Proof-of-Stake under Scrutiny” by Ulysse Pavloff, Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou, and Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni

TLDR:

• Ethereum’s transition to Proof-of-Stake was a massive engineering feat widely celebrated within the crypto community.

• Nevertheless, as with any nascent distributed system, there are novel attacks that have emerged with The Merge, especially related to liveness, which is a core property blockchains must retain.

• We have covered nascent PoS attack types on the forum, notably Rebalancing Attacks. This paper introduces a new type of attack called a Bouncing attack, which is a form of liveness attack that can impact Ethereum’s uptime if exploited on-chain.

2. “Optimistic and Validity Rollups: Analysis and Comparison between Optimism and StarkNet” by Luca Donno

TLDR:

• Rollups have become critical for the scalability of public blockchains, but their architecture and implementation vary widely.

• This paper does a great job of providing the conceptual building blocks of the two most popular rollup types: zero-knowledge rollups and optimistic rollups.

• Beyond just the theoretical backbone of these rollup types, the author also discusses the two most popular implementations of each rollup type: STARKNET and Optimism.

3. “Robust Clustering of Ethereum Transactions Using Time Leakage from Fixed Nodes” by Congcong Yu, Chen Yang, Zheng Che, and Liehuang Zhu

TLDR:

• Address clustering has become a popular practice amongst crypto data enthusiasts because it enables a real-world entity, such as a crypto exchange, to be associated with a set of addresses on-chain.

• In turn, this enables on-chain observers to have a better understanding of the activities that these entities are engaging in, which can be useful in due-dilligence and market sentiment analysis.

• This paper discusses a new way to cluster addresses associated with an entity via a network-level privacy attack at the node level.

4. “SoK: Not Quite Water Under the Bridge: Review of Cross-Chain Bridge Hacks” by Sung-Shine Lee, Alexandr Murashkin, Martin Derka, and Jan Gorzny

TLDR:

• Cross-chain bridges have faced severe security issues over the past year, and bridge hacks are amongst the largest in the history of cryptoassets.

• This paper provides interesting conceptual background on cross-chain bridges and describes how they are typically constructed.

• The paper also sheds light on notable bridge hacks, such as the PolyNetwork hack, and discusses the challenges associated with securing cross-chain bridges.

Research collected and curated by @cipherix.

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not intended as legal, business, investment, or tax advice.

The Smart Contract Research Forum’s (SCRF) bold mission is to advance web3 through actionable research and knowledge-sharing. To this end, SCRF connects researchers and builders, sponsors projects, and constructs collaborative forums. SCRF’s community is an active, international network of academics, industry architects, and blockchain advocates.