About Me

I work on computer security and applied cryptograhpy. My research aims to solve security problems in real-world decentralized systems. In particular, I’m interested in designing novel solutions leveraging decentralized consensus (aka blockchains), cryptography, game theory, and even trusted execution environments (TEEs). I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University, advised by Prof. Ari Juels. I received my bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University. In my separate capacity, I’m a faculty advisor at Chainlink Labs. I’m also affilicated with Center for Distributed Confidential Computing (CDCC) and Center for Algorithms, Data, and Market Design at Yale.

You might be interested in:

• Prooφ: a transaction fee mechanism for ZK Rollups
• zkBridge: trustless cross-chain interoperability using SNARKs.
• Mempool Guru: an open public service that persists Ethereum mempool data for research.
• DECO: proving TLS data provenance while protecting privacy.
• I’m teaching an intro to blockchain course at Yale.
• Other projects

To learn more, you can check out my research page and publications.

Updates

• (May 2024) 📣 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.
• (Apr 2024) 🎉 “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 "
• (Mar 2024) 📣 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.
• (Mar 2024) 🎉 “Sprints: Intermittent Blockchain PoW Mining” is accepted to USENIX Security'24.
• (Sep 2023) 🎉 “The Locality of Memory Checking” with Weijie Wang, Yujie Lu, and Charalampos Papamanthou is online! (To appear in CCS'23)
• (Jul 2023) 🎙️ “Sprints: Intermittent Blockchain PoW Mining” will be presented at SBC'23.
• (Jun 2023) 📣 “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!
• (May 2023) 📣 “Sprints: Intermittent Blockchain PoW Mining” with Michael Mirkin, Lulu Zhou, Ittay Eyal is online.
• (May 2023) 🎉 “MISO: Legacy-compatible Privacy-preserving Single Sign-on using Trusted Execution Environments” has been accepted to EurpS&P 2023.
• (Feb 2023) 🎉 Received Yale Roberts Innovation Fund Award.

• (Oct 2022) He-HTLC: Revisiting Incentives in HTLC is accepted to NDSS 2023. Congrats to Sarisht and Jannis!
• (Aug 2022) zkBridge: Trustless Cross-chain Bridges Made Practical is accepted to CCS 2022.
• (Aug 2022) We wrote a blog post on incentive attacks in HTLCs and our solution He-HTLC.
• (Aug 2022) 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.
• (Jul 2022) Received three grants from Ethereum Foundation.
• (May 2022) 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.
• (Apr 2022) Our work on empirical analysis of EIP-1559 is presented at ETHconomics @ Devconnect 2022. Recording available here.
• (Mar 2022) Our paper on empirical analysis of EIP-1559 is accepted in CCS 2022.
• (Mar 2022) I will join the TPC of Oakland'23.
• (Dec 2021) I will join the TPC of CCS'22 and DeFi'22.
• (May 2021) I will join the TPC of PET 2022 and AFT 2021.
• (Nov 2020) I joined the TPC of PET 2021 and CCS 2021.
• (Nov 2020) I presented DECO at CCS'20.
• (Oct 2020) I presented CanDID at the annual convention of Chinese Institute of Engineers - Greater New York Chapter.
• (Oct 2020) I presented CanDID at Empire Hacking (organized by Trail of Bits).
• (Oct 2020) I presented DECO at W3C Credential Community Group (CCG).
• (Oct 2020) I joined the TPC of Financial Crypto 2021 and DeFi'21 workshop.
• (Sep 2020) CanDID paper is accepted to IEEE S&P 2021!
• (Aug 2020) DECO acquisition by ChainLink is announced!
• (Jul 2020) CanDID, our latest work on Decentralized Identity (DID) is available online.
• (Mar 2020) DECO accepted to CCS 2020!
• (Jan 2020) Real World Crypto (RWC) video on DECO is now available online.
• (Oct 2019) I visited ETH Zurich and presented “Connecting Blockchains to the Real World”.
• (Oct 2019) I presented Paralysis Proofs at ACM AFT 2019 at Zurich, Switzerland.
• (Sep 2019) I visited IBM Waston Center and presented DECO (Decenetralized Oracles)."
• (Sep 2019) Two papers (CHURP, Tesseract) are accepted to ACM CCS'19! See you all in London!
• (Aug 2019) “Paralysis Proofs: Secure Access-Structure Updates for Cryptocurrencies and More” is accepted to ACM AFT'19!
• (Apr 2019) “Ekiden: A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contract Execution” is accepted to EuroS&P'19!
• (Nov 2018) Town Crier is acquired by ChainLink!
• (Mar 2018) I’m awarded the IBM PhD Fellowship Award for 2018-2020.
• (Mar 2018) I presented Paralysis Proof at the 5th Bitcoin workshop @ Financial Crypto 2018 in Curacao.
• (Aug 2017) Solidus: Confidential Distributed Ledger Transactions via PVORM is accepted to CCS'17.
• (Aug 2017) I was invited to present Town Crier at Silicon Valley Ethereum Meetup.
• (Aug 2017) I presented REM at USENIX Security 2017, Vancouver, Canada.
• (Jul 2017) Intern at Intel Labs this summer.
• (May 2017) Town Crier is officially live!
• (May 2017) REM: Resource-Efficient Mining for Blockchains paper is accepted to USENIX Security'17. Available here.
• (Oct 2016) Sealed-Glass Proofs: Using Transparent Enclaves to Prove and Sell Knowledge is accepted to EuroS&P ‘17.
• (Jul 2016) Town Crier: An Authenticated Data Feed for Smart Contracts is accepted to ACM CCS'16.
• (May 2016) Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs is accepted to USENIX Security'16.