We are excited to announce that our professor, Prof. LUO Xiapu Daniel, and his research team have recently received the “Distinguished Paper Award” and the “Best DeFi Papers Award” from ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2024), in recognition of their groundbreaking contributions to the field of blockchain security.
Distinguished Paper Award at CCS 2024
The research paper “DoubleUp Roll: Double-spending in Arbitrum by Rolling It Back”, authored by Prof. LUO and Mr Zhiyuan SUN, our PhD student, won the Distinguished Paper Award at CCS 2024. Other collaborator of this paper comes from Southern University of Science and Technology.
This research paper identifies critical vulnerabilities in widely-used optimistic rollup protocols, specifically Arbitrum and Optimism. It reveals three novel double-spending attacks, including overtime attack, queuecut attack, and zip-bomb attack, which could allow attackers to steal funds from cross-chain applications at no cost. These severe vulnerabilities were promptly reported to the Arbitrum and Optimism teams, who recognised the contributions with significant bug bounties and resolved the issues. This research prevented potential damages that could have escalated to billions.
The ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) is the flagship annual conference of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC), underscoring the significance of this recognition.
Read more: https://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2024
Best DeFi Papers Award 2023 at ACM CCS Workshop on Decentralized Finance and Security 2024 (DeFi’24)
In addition to the Distinguished Paper Award, Prof. LUO and Mr Zihao LI, our PhD student, also won the “Best DeFi Papers Award 2023” from the DeFi’24, which was co-located with CCS 2024. This award-winning paper entitled “Demystifying DeFi MEV Activities in Flashbots Bundle” was published at CCS 2023.This award is presented to authors whose published work in 2023 represents outstanding and groundbreaking research in all essential aspects of DeFi. Other collaborators of this paper come from Xi'an Jiaotong University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and Pennsylvania State University.
This work presents an innovative methodology for discovering previously unknown DeFi miner extractable value (MEV) activities, featuring two new tools: ActLifter and ActCluster. ActLifter excels in identifying DeFi actions in transactions of each bundle with nearly 100% precision and recall, outperforming existing technologies. ActCluster uses iterative clustering to help analysts discover DeFi MEV activities. The team has discovered 17 new types of DeFi MEV activities, which occur in over 53% of bundles. This work also demonstrates how their new approach can enhance existing MEV studies, like improving MEV countermeasures, assessing forking and reorganisation risks posed by bundle MEV activities, and evaluating the impact of bundle MEV activities on the economic security of blockchain.
The ACM CCS Workshop on Decentralized Finance and Security (DeFi) stands as the premier research symposium in Decentralized Finance, aimed at fostering the development of a secure and trustworthy DeFi ecosystem.
Read More: https://defi.security/#best-papers
