2023/10/02 by Weilin Li, Li, Weilin, Zhun Wang +13 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.01081
openalex publication_date 2023/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The rapid growth and adoption of decentralized finance (DeFi) systems have been accompanied by various threats, notably those emerging from vulnerabilities in their intricate design. In our work, we introduce and define an attack strategy termed as Role-Play Attack, in which the attacker acts as multiple roles concurrently to exploit the DeFi system and cause substantial financial losses. We provide a formal definition of this strategy and demonstrate its potential impacts by revealing the total loss of $435.1M caused by 14 historical attacks with applying this pattern. Besides, we mathematically analyzed the attacks with top 2 losses and retrofitted the corresponding attack pattern by concrete execution, indicating that this strategy could increase the potential profit for original attacks by $3.34M (51.4%) and $3.76M (12.0%), respectively.