The seconomics (security-economics) vulnerabilities of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

Massacci, F.; Ngo, C.N.; Nie, J.; Venturi, D.; Williams, J.

Abstract

Traditionally, security and economics functionalities in IT financial services and protocols (FinTech) have been perceived as separate objectives. We argue that keeping them separate is a bad idea for FinTech “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs). In fact, security and economics are one for DAOs: we show that the failure of a security property, e.g. anonymity, can destroy a DAOs because economic attacks can be tailgated to security attacks. This is illustrated by the examples of “TheDAO” (built on the Ethereum platform) and the DAOed version of a Futures Exchange. We claim that security and economics vulnerabilities, which we named seconomics vulnerabilities, are indeed new “beasts” to be reckoned with.

Citation

Massacci, F., Ngo, C., Nie, J., Venturi, D., & Williams, J. (2017, March). The seconomics (security-economics) vulnerabilities of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Presented at 25th Cambridge International Workshop on Security Protocols, Cambridge, England

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 25th Cambridge International Workshop on Security Protocols
• Start Date: Mar 20, 2017
• End Date: Mar 22, 2017
• Acceptance Date: May 21, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Nov 29, 2017
• Publication Date: Nov 29, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jan 29, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 29, 2018
• Print ISSN: 0302-9743
• Pages: 171-179
• Series Title: Lecture notes in computer science
• Series Number: 10476
• Series ISSN: 0302-9743,1611-3349
• Book Title: Security protocols XXV : 25th international workshop, Cambridge, UK, March 20-22, 2017 : revised selected papers.
• ISBN: 9783319710747
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71075-4_19
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1146059