Computer Engineering Commons^™

Enabling Third Layer Bitcoin Applications Using Lightning Network, Ahmet Kurt

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When Bitcoin was introduced in 2009, it created a big sensation in the world as it was first of its kind. Since then, a lot of different cryptocurrencies were proposed. Today, cryptocurrencies can be used to pay for goods and services similar to using cash or credit cards. However, none of them could replace or supersede Bitcoin in usage or market capitalization. Current market conditions still imply that it will stay the same way. However, Bitcoin suffers from very low transaction per second (TPS) which limits its usability on large scale. There have been numerous proposals to increase its scalability …

A Deep-Dive Into Cryptojacking Malware: From An Empirical Analysis To A Detection Method For Computationally Weak Devices, Ege Tekiner

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cryptojacking is an act of using a victim's computation power without his/her consent. Unauthorized mining costs extra electricity consumption and decreases the victim host's computational efficiency dramatically. In this thesis, we perform an extensive research on cryptojacking malware from every aspects. First, we present a systematic overview of cryptojacking malware based on the information obtained from the combination of academic research papers, two large cryptojacking datasets of samples, and numerous major attack instances. Second, we created a dataset of 6269 websites containing cryptomining scripts in their source codes to characterize the in-browser cryptomining ecosystem by differentiating permissioned and permissionless cryptomining …

Secure Distributed Systems Over Satoshi Blockchains, Ruben Recabarren Velarde

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) have become an important driving force towards the creation of novel distributed applications aimed at solving problems that range from digital currency tools to self governing digital democracy systems.

Our thesis is that Satoshi cryptocurrencies, i.e., Bitcoin and its variants, can be used to endow several popular distributed services with strong privacy, anonymity and censorship resistance properties that evade current solutions.

To this end, we first study the design of Satoshi cryptocurrency mining protocols, and discover and document privacy and integrity vulnerabilities of Stratum, the de-facto pooled mining protocol.

We have developed tools that exploit these …

A Private Bitcoin Payment Network With Reduced Transaction Fees And Confirmation Times, Enes Erdin

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since its introduction, Bitcoin cryptocurrency has revolutionized the way payment systems can be designed in a purely distributed manner through its novel Blockchain data structure. While Bitcoin has opened new opportunities, it has been long criticized for its slow transaction confirmation times and high transaction fees. To address this issue, one of the recently emerging solutions is to build a payment channel network (PCN) on top of Bitcoin where the transactions can be made without writing to blockchain. Specifically, a PCN is a network where the users connect either directly or indirectly to send payments to each other in a …