A team consisting of our academic staff and PhD students has been selected as the winner of the “Best Practical Paper” in the Cybersecurity Award 2025. This annual award, presented by the journal Cybersecurity (SpringerOpen), recognises research papers that demonstrate outstanding and groundbreaking contributions to the field of cybersecurity.
The winning paper, titled "DoubleUp Roll: Double-spending in Arbitrum by Rolling It Back," was presented at the 2024 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '24). The authors of the paper include:
- Mr Zhiyuan SUN (COMP PhD Student)
- Dr Zihao LI (COMP Postdoctoral Fellow)
- Mr Xinghao PENG (COMP PhD Student)
- Prof. Xiapu LUO (Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences; COMP Professor)
- Dr Muhui JIANG (COMP PhD Graduate)
- Dr Hao ZHOU (COMP Research Assistant Professor)
- Prof. Yinqian ZHANG (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.
Congratulations to our outstanding team for their remarkable achievement and for making a significant impact on the security of blockchain technologies!
For more information about the award, please click here.
To read the winning paper, please click here.
