Updates

Excited to share Crypto x AI, AI x Crypto: A Survey, a new survey on the intersection of “blockchain tech” and AI. We aim to separate real technical progress from hype and outline open problems for the next wave of research.

Two papers (Perils of Parallelism and Spam MEV) are accepted to SBC'26!

Perils of Parallelism: Transaction Fee Mechanisms under Execution Uncertainty is accepted to USENIX Security'26!

Three papers accepted to ACM CCS'26: Relect, Censorship vs. Throughput, and Insecurity Through Obscurity.

Two papers accepted to present at Designing DeFi (D²).

Geographical Centralization Resilience in Ethereum's Block-Building Paradigms is accepted to ACM SIGMETRICS'26!

VAR (ePrint 2025/2330) is presented at Northeastern Security Day (NESD).

Cirrus: Performant and Accountable Distributed SNARK is presented at NDSS'26!

Received a collaborative NSF award to work on TEE powered Confidential Genome Imputation and Analytics.

Recent talks: IC3 Blockchain Camp, NoConsensus@SBC25, and ETH NYC'25.

New paper Insecurity Through Obscurity: Veiled Vulnerabilities in Closed-Source Contracts is online. Also check out the nice highlight by EigenPhi.

“Decentralization of Ethereum’s Builder Market” is accepted to IEEE S&P 2025. Congrats, Sen!

“AUCIL: An Inclusion List Design for Rational Parties” is online.

Qelect is accepted to USENIX Security 2025.

Prooφ is accepted to FC 2025.

RediSwap is online. RediSwap is a novel AMM that captures MEV at the application level and refunds it fairly among users and liquidity providers.

DECO, the first zkTLS protocol we devised in 2019, is now in Chainlink’s Platform Privacy Suite.

The texbook I co-authored, titled “Blockchain, the New Economy, and the Self-Sovereign Internet”, is now available for pre-order through Cambridge University Press.

ZIPNet is accepted to PoPETS 2025! We use TEEs to make DC nets faster while i) not trusting TEE for priavcy, ii) making TEE breaches detectable.

Spent a productive week at Dagstuhl! Thanks to the organizers.

Received Sui Academic Research Award.

Excited to finally release this paper on measuring the decentralization of Ethereum’s builder market. In terms of market share, the market is highly centralized. However, we ask two questions: first, why does the builder market centralize, given that it is permissionless and anyone can join? Second, does the centralization affect the efficacy of MEV-Boost auctions? We answered these two questions using a large-scale auction dataset we curated since 2022. Read more here.

“Data Independent Order Policy Enforcement: Limitations and Solutions” has been accepted to CCS 2024. TLDR: it proposes an AMM design that prevents sandwich attacks with a clever (credit to co authors) incentive design "

Excited to share some early results on ZK Rollup prover market fee mechanisms with this position paper on Prooφ (proo-fee). A prover market is where ZK provers sell proof capacity, and users pay to get transactions proven (potentially coordinated by sequencers). EIP-1559 is a nice TFM for L1, but it does not work here because generating ZK proofs is expensive ($$$) today, while EIP-1559 burns most of the revenues. Challenges arise when we try to design something that covers the prover’s heterogeneous cost and has nice properties like those of EIP-1559, and Prooφ is a solution that satisfies desired properties under certain conditions.

“Sprints: Intermittent Blockchain PoW Mining” is accepted to USENIX Security'24.

“The Locality of Memory Checking” with Weijie Wang, Yujie Lu, and Charalampos Papamanthou is online! (To appear in CCS'23)

“Sprints: Intermittent Blockchain PoW Mining” will be presented at SBC'23.

“Breaking the Chains of Rationality: Understanding the Limitations to and Obtaining Order Policy Enforcement” with Sarisht Wadhwa, Luca Zanolini, Francesco D’Amato, Aditya Asgaonkar, and Kartik Nayak is online!

“Sprints: Intermittent Blockchain PoW Mining” with Michael Mirkin, Lulu Zhou, Ittay Eyal is online.

“MISO: Legacy-compatible Privacy-preserving Single Sign-on using Trusted Execution Environments” has been accepted to EurpS&P 2023.

Received Yale Roberts Innovation Fund Award.

He-HTLC: Revisiting Incentives in HTLC is accepted to NDSS 2023. Congrats to Sarisht and Jannis!

zkBridge: Trustless Cross-chain Bridges Made Practical is accepted to CCS 2022.

We wrote a blog post on incentive attacks in HTLCs and our solution He-HTLC.

Received an NSF Frontier grant for the Center for Distributed Confidential Computing. This is a multi-institution effort, involving faculty from IU (Lead), CMU, Duke, OSU, Penn State, Purdue, Spelman, UIUC and Yale. Yale News.

Received three grants from Ethereum Foundation.

Manuscript on He-HTLC is online. We revisited bribery attacks in HTLCs (hash-time locked contracts), presented a new family of them (reverse bribery), and proposed a solution.

Our work on empirical analysis of EIP-1559 is presented at ETHconomics @ Devconnect 2022. Recording available here.

Our paper on empirical analysis of EIP-1559 is accepted in CCS 2022.

I will join the TPC of Oakland'23.

I will join the TPC of CCS'22 and DeFi'22.

I will join the TPC of PET 2022 and AFT 2021.

I joined the TPC of PET 2021 and CCS 2021.

I presented DECO at CCS'20.

I presented CanDID at the annual convention of Chinese Institute of Engineers - Greater New York Chapter.

I presented CanDID at Empire Hacking (organized by Trail of Bits).

I presented DECO at W3C Credential Community Group (CCG).

I joined the TPC of Financial Crypto 2021 and DeFi'21 workshop.

CanDID paper is accepted to IEEE S&P 2021!

DECO acquisition by ChainLink is announced!

CanDID, our latest work on Decentralized Identity (DID) is available online.

DECO accepted to CCS 2020!

Real World Crypto (RWC) video on DECO is now available online.

I visited ETH Zurich and presented “Connecting Blockchains to the Real World”.

I presented Paralysis Proofs at ACM AFT 2019 at Zurich, Switzerland.

I visited IBM Waston Center and presented DECO (Decenetralized Oracles)."

Two papers (CHURP, Tesseract) are accepted to ACM CCS'19! See you all in London!

“Paralysis Proofs: Secure Access-Structure Updates for Cryptocurrencies and More” is accepted to ACM AFT'19!

“Ekiden: A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contract Execution” is accepted to EuroS&P'19!

Town Crier is acquired by ChainLink!

I’m awarded the IBM PhD Fellowship Award for 2018-2020.

I presented Paralysis Proof at the 5th Bitcoin workshop @ Financial Crypto 2018 in Curacao.

Solidus: Confidential Distributed Ledger Transactions via PVORM is accepted to CCS'17.

I was invited to present Town Crier at Silicon Valley Ethereum Meetup.

I presented REM at USENIX Security 2017, Vancouver, Canada.

Intern at Intel Labs this summer.

Town Crier is officially live!

REM: Resource-Efficient Mining for Blockchains paper is accepted to USENIX Security'17. Available here.

Sealed-Glass Proofs: Using Transparent Enclaves to Prove and Sell Knowledge is accepted to EuroS&P ‘17.

Town Crier: An Authenticated Data Feed for Smart Contracts is accepted to ACM CCS'16.

Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs is accepted to USENIX Security'16.