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The Eye of Horus: Spotting and Analyzing Attacks on Ethereum Smart Contracts
In recent years, Ethereum gained tremendously in popularity, growing fro...
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Towards a First Step to Understand the Cryptocurrency Stealing Attack on Ethereum
We performed the first systematic study of a new attack on Ethereum to s...
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Evolution of Ethereum: A Temporal Graph Perspective
Ethereum is one of the most popular blockchain systems that supports mor...
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Quantifying Blockchain Extractable Value: How dark is the forest?
Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have excelled at financial se...
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A Data Science Approach for Honeypot Detection in Ethereum
Ethereum smart contracts have recently drawn a considerable amount of at...
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Basis Path Coverage Criteria for Smart Contract Application Testing
The widespread recognition of the smart contracts has established their ...
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Towards understanding flash loan and its applications in defi ecosystem
Flash Loan, as an emerging service in the decentralized finance ecosyste...
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Frontrunner Jones and the Raiders of the Dark Forest: An Empirical Study of Frontrunning on the Ethereum Blockchain
Ethereum prospered the inception of a plethora of smart contract applications, ranging from gambling games to decentralized finance. However, Ethereum is also considered a highly adversarial environment, where vulnerable smart contracts will eventually be exploited. Recently, Ethereum's pool of pending transaction has become a far more aggressive environment. In the hope of making some profit, attackers continuously monitor the transaction pool and try to front-run their victims' transactions by either displacing or suppressing them, or strategically inserting their transactions. This paper aims to shed some light into what is known as a dark forest and uncover these predators' actions. We present a methodology to efficiently measure the three types of frontrunning: displacement, insertion, and suppression. We perform a large-scale analysis on more than 11M blocks and identify almost 200K attacks with an accumulated profit of 18.41M USD for the attackers, providing evidence that frontrunning is both, lucrative and a prevalent issue.
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