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CSE 190: Blockchain Security Deian Stefan

About

This course focuses on the security of blockchain technologies. Students will be introduced to many parts of the blockchain infrastructure — from the design and implementation of consensus protocols, to the programming layers above them, and the DeFi applications handling billions of dollars — and explore the different ways these systems can—and have—failed under adversarial settings. We will study attacks against real systems, revisit the security and assumptions of widely deployed protocols and applications, and analyze the impact of attacks, scams, and thefts.

Lectures: : Monday and Wednesday, 5:00--6:20pm, RWAC 0115

Staff: : Instructor: Deian Stefan (with guest appearances from Enze Liu)

: Teaching Assistant: Naomi Smith

Office hours: : Deian: Monday 6:30pm, CSE 3126 : Naomi: TBA

Class questions and discussion: : [Piazza](: https://piazza.com/ucsd/spring2025/cse190) : CSE slack channel #cse190-sp25-blockchain

Calendar and Readings

Mon Mar 31 2025: Introduction

• Slides

Wed Apr 2 2025: Background

• Slides
• Reading:
  • Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, by Satoshi Nakamoto

Mon Apr 7 2025: Bitcoin (part 1)

• Slides
• Reading:
  • Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, by Satoshi Nakamoto
  • Block Chain, Transactions, P2P Network sections from Bitcoin Developer Guide

Wed Apr 9 2025: Bitcoin (part 2)

• Reading:
  • Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable by Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer

Mon Apr 14 2025: Bitcoin (part 3)

• Slides
• Reading:
  • A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names by Sarah Meiklejohn et al.
• Optional reading:
  • Mt. Gox: What We Still Don't Know 10 Years After the Collapse
  • How to Peel a Million: Validating and Expanding Bitcoin Clusters by George Kappos et al.

Mon Apr 16 2025: Bitcoin Consensus Enze Alex Liu

• Slides

Mon Apr 21 2025: Ethereum (part 1)

• Slides
• Reading:
  • Ethereum docs
  • Beaconchain explainer
• Optional:
  • Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger -- EIP-150 revision by Gavin Wood

Wed Apr 23 2025: Ethereum (part 2)

• Slides
• Reading:
  • Solidity
  • ERC-4337

Mon Apr 28 2025: DeFi: Stablecoins, lending protocols, swaps and DEXes (part 1)

• Reading:
  • Uniswap

Wed Apr 30 2025: DeFi: Stablecoins, lending protocols, swaps and DEXes (part 2)

• Reading:
  • Attacking the DeFi Ecosystem with Flash Loans for Fun and Profit by K. Qin et al.
  • SoK: Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Attacks by Liyi Zhou et al.

Mon May 5 2025: Review

Wed May 7 2025: Midterm Exam

Mon May 12 2025: Mixers

• Slides
• Reading:
  • Mixcoin: Anonymity for Bitcoin with accountable mixes by Joseph Bonneau et al.
  • Bitcoin Fog
• Optional:
  • How Tornado Cash Works

Wed May 14 2025: MEV and frontrunning

• Slides
• Reading:
  • Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges by Philip Daian et al.
  • Quantifying Blockchain Extractable Value: How dark is the forest? by Kaihua Qin et al.
• Optional:
  • Time to Brige: Measuring Block Construction Markets by Anton Wahrstätter et al.

Mon May 19 2025: DeFi Hacks

• Reading:
  • Attacking the DeFi Ecosystem with Flash Loans for Fun and Profit by K. Qin et al.
  • SoK: Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Attacks by Liyi Zhou et al.

Wed May 21 2025: Cross-chain bridges (part 1)

• Slides
• Reading:
  • zkBridge: Trustless Cross-chain Bridges Made Practical by Tiancheng Xie et al.

Mon May 26 2025: No class

Wed May 28 2025: Cross-chain bridges (part 2)

• Reading:
  • SoK: Security of Cross-chain Bridges: Attack Surfaces, Defenses, and Open Problems by Zhang et al.

Mon June 2 2025: Fun topics (Avalanche)

• Reading:
  • Scalable and Probabilistic Leaderless BFT Consensus through Metastability
  • Vryx: Fortifying Decoupled State Machine Replication by P. O'Grady
  • Frosty: Bringing strong liveness guarantees to the Snow family of consensus protocols. by A. Buchwald et al.

Wed June 4 2025: Review

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