Aviv Frenkel

dblp:405/9514 · DBLP profile ↗
← Back
1ranked-venue papers
1as first author
1since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Security and privacy · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Network and information security
1 paper
Cryptographic primitives and cryptanalysis · 56% Blockchain and cryptocurrency security · 44%

Topics — the 2 heaviest of 3, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Blockchain and cryptocurrency security
blockchain network security
0.912025
An Attack on TON's ADNL Secure Channel Protocol · SP 2025
Cryptographic primitives and cryptanalysis › symmetric-key cryptanalysis
plaintext recovery attack
0.912025
An Attack on TON's ADNL Secure Channel Protocol · SP 2025

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

protocol analysis · 0.9plaintext modeling · 0.9cryptanalysis · 0.9
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 An Attack on TON's ADNL Secure Channel Protocol
abstract
We present an attack on the Abstract Datagram Network Layer (ADNL) protocol used in The Open Network (TON), currently the 10th largest blockchain by market capitalization. In its TCP variant, ADNL secures communication between clients and specialized nodes called liteservers, which provide access to blockchain data. We identify two crypto-graphic design flaws in this protocol: a handshake that permits session-key replay and a non-standard integrity mechanism whose security critically depends on message confidentiality. We transform these vulnerabilities into an efficient plaintext-recovery attack by exploiting two ADNL communication patterns, allowing message reordering across replayed sessions. We then develop a plaintext model for this scenario and construct an efficient algorithm that recovers the keystream using a fraction of known plaintexts and a handful of replays. We implement our attack and show that an attacker intercepting the communication between a TON liteserver and a widely deployed ADNL client can recover the keystream used to encrypt server responses by performing eight connection replays to the server. This allows the decryption of sensitive data, such as account balances and user activity patterns. Additionally, the attacker can modify server responses to manipulate blockchain information displayed to the client, including account balances and asset prices.
Aviv Frenkel, Dmitry Kogan
SP1