Ren Zhang (Nervos), Dingwei Zhang (Nervos), Quake Wang (Nervos), Shichen Wu (School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shandong University), Jan Xie (Nervos), Bart Preneel (imec-COSIC, KU Leuven)

First implemented in Bitcoin, Nakamoto Consensus (NC) is the most influential consensus protocol in cryptocurrencies despite all the alternative protocols designed afterward. Nevertheless, NC is trapped by a security-performance tradeoff. While existing efforts mostly attempt to break this tradeoff via abandoning or adjusting NC's backbone protocol, we alternatively forward the relevance of the network layer. We identify and experimentally prove that the crux resides with the prolonged block propagation latency caused by not-yet-propagated transactions. We thus present a two-step mechanism to confirm only fully-propagated transactions, and therefore remove the limits upon NC's performance imposed by its security demands, realizing NC's untapped potential. Implementing this two-step mechanism, we propose NC-Max, whose (1) security is analyzed, proving that it provides stronger resistance than NC against transaction withholding attacks, and (2) performance is evaluated, showing that it exhausts the full throughput supported by the network, and shortens the transaction confirmation latency by 3.0 to 6.6 times compared to NC without compromising security. NC-Max is implemented in Nervos CKB, a public permissionless blockchain.

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FirmWire: Transparent Dynamic Analysis for Cellular Baseband Firmware

Grant Hernandez (University of Florida), Marius Muench (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Dominik Maier (TU Berlin), Alyssa Milburn (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Shinjo Park (TU Berlin), Tobias Scharnowski (Ruhr-University Bochum), Tyler Tucker (University of Florida), Patrick Traynor (University of Florida), Kevin Butler (University of Florida)

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FANDEMIC: Firmware Attack Construction and Deployment on Power Management...

Ryan Tsang (University of California, Davis), Doreen Joseph (University of California, Davis), Qiushi Wu (University of California, Davis), Soheil Salehi (University of California, Davis), Nadir Carreon (University of Arizona), Prasant Mohapatra (University of California, Davis), Houman Homayoun (University of California, Davis)

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PoF: Proof-of-Following for Vehicle Platoons

Ziqi Xu (University of Arizona), Jingcheng Li (University of Arizona), Yanjun Pan (University of Arizona), Loukas Lazos (University of Arizona, Tucson), Ming Li (University of Arizona, Tucson), Nirnimesh Ghose (University of Nebraska–Lincoln)

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Building Embedded Systems Like It’s 1996

Ruotong Yu (Stevens Institute of Technology, University of Utah), Francesca Del Nin (University of Padua), Yuchen Zhang (Stevens Institute of Technology), Shan Huang (Stevens Institute of Technology), Pallavi Kaliyar (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Sarah Zakto (Cyber Independent Testing Lab), Mauro Conti (University of Padua, Delft University of Technology), Georgios Portokalidis (Stevens Institute of…

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