Crypto · Security
how resilient are layer two rollups to fraud-prover censorship?
Layer two rollups that rely on fraud proofs aim to inherit Ethereum's security while scaling transactions off-chain. A central vulnerability is fraud-prover censorship, where the party responsible for submitting or
how can formal verification improve smart contract security assurance?
Formal methods bring rigorous, mathematically based guarantees to software. Applied to smart contracts, they shift assurance from testing and auditing to provable correctness against a specification. This matters because smart
how can mev extraction be reduced without sacrificing protocol incentives?
Cryptocurrency networks regularly surface value outside block rewards when transaction ordering and inclusion allow extractable profit. Research by Philip Daian Cornell University and Ari Juels Cornell Tech identified how this
which security trade-offs exist between custodial and noncustodial crypto services?
Custodial services: centralization, convenience, and systemic risk
Custodial crypto services hold private keys and act as intermediaries, trading user sovereignty for convenience and regulatory compliance. This model reduces individual responsibility for
how should blockchains transition to post-quantum cryptography without disrupting consensus?
Quantum-capable algorithms such as the one developed by Peter Shor Massachusetts Institute of Technology threaten the asymmetric primitives that secure current blockchain keys. Cryptographers warn of a “store now, decrypt
how effective is threshold cryptography for decentralized key custody?
Threshold cryptography splits control of a private key among multiple participants so that cryptographic operations require cooperation by a threshold number of share-holders. The approach builds on secret sharing introduced
how does social recovery work for crypto wallets?
Social recovery is a technique that replaces the single, easily lost private key with a human-centered fallback that preserves control without surrendering custody. It is implemented by smart-contract wallets or
what vulnerabilities do smart contract upgradability patterns introduce?
Smart contract upgradability patterns allow deployed systems to change behavior after launch, but they also introduce distinct technical and socio-legal vulnerabilities that erode the guarantees users expect from immutable ledgers.
what security risks do cross-chain bridges introduce?
Cross-chain bridges enable value and data to move between blockchains, but they introduce concentrated points of failure that combine technical, economic, and governance risks. Bridges often centralize trust assumptions that
what are risks of oracle manipulation in defi?
DeFi depends on external information feeds known as price oracles to translate off-chain market data into on-chain state. When those feeds are wrong or controlled by adversaries, the result is