Bio. I like breaking things: pushing systems to their limits and understanding how they fail is fundamental to making them more robust, secure, and economically sound. This drives my research into the economics and security of distributed systems. I am currently a postdoc at Yale, where I am grateful for being hosted by Fan Zhang, and co-hosted by Ben Fisch, Charalampos (Babis) Papamanthou, and Zhong Shao. I am also a member of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies & Contracts (IC3) and Yale's Applied Crypto Lab (YACL). Additionally, I am a visiting researcher at Innsbruck University, graciously hosted by Rainer Böhme. Previously, I had the pleasure of doing a PhD with Aviv Zohar at HUJI. During my studies, I was the sole lecturer of two large-scale courses. I am thankful for the recognition my work has received. Among other honors, the CBER Forum named me one of the top PhD graduates of 2023-2024, and I was named as one of the top 10 teaching staff (out of 111) in HUJI's teaching survey. Moreover, I received the CCS Distinguished Paper award, the CBER Best Paper award, HUJI's annual teaching award, the AIANI and Ze'ev Jabotinsky fellowships, and HUJI's rector award for first-in-class MSc students.
Do get in touch if you want to collaborate or chat. This includes undergrads looking for cool projects!
News.
21 Apr 2025:Check out our new paper Insecurity Through Obscurity: Veiled Vulnerabilities in Closed-Source Contracts!03 Mar 2025:Yotam Gafni and I released a new version of our paper Scheduling With Time Discounts, check it out!27 Jan 2025:Varun Madathil and I are running Yale's Applied Crypto seminar, you're invited.09 Jan 2025:Proophi: A ZKP Market Mechanism has been accepted to FC'25.01 Sep 2024:Excited to be starting a postdoc at Yale, hosted by Fan Zhang, Ben Fisch, Charalampos Papamanthou, and Zhong Shao!23 May 2024:Honored to have won the 4th Annual CBER Conference's best paper award for Suboptimality in DeFi!06 Apr 2024:Hao Chung, Matheus VX Ferreira, Yotam Gafni & I will give a tutorial on transaction fee mechanisms at EC'24.20 Feb 2024:Invited to the 2024 Workshop on Algorithms for Learning and Economics (WALE).01 Dec 2023:Received the ACM CCS Distinguished Paper award for my paper Uncle Maker.29 Sep 2023:Invited to speak at YoungEC '24, do reach it out if you're there.01 Jul 2023:Grateful for receiving two Ethereum Foundation Academic Grants!
Selected Papers.
USENIXSEC'24 Speculative Denial-of-Service Attacks in Ethereum
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Aviv Zohar, Arthur Gervais
In: Proceedings of the 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIXSEC'24) A*
🏆 Awarded a Flashbots bounty
🏆 Awarded an Ethereum Foundation bounty
🏆 Ranked 63rd in MLSEC's Normalized Top-100 Security Papers list
📰 Covered by BlockworksEC'24 Barriers to Collusion-resistant Transaction Fee Mechanisms
Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish
In: Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'24) A*SBC'24 Suboptimality in DeFi
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Maya Dotan, Kaihua Qin, Aviv Zohar, Arthur Gervais
In: The Science of Blockchain Conference 2024 (SBC'24) Acceptance rate: 14%
🏆 Received the 4th Annual Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research (CBER) Conference's best paper awardCCS'23 Uncle Maker: (Time)Stamping Out The Competition
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Gilad Stern, Aviv Zohar
In: Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'23) A*
🏆 Received the ACM CCS 2023 Distinguished Paper award
📰 Covered by International Business Times, CryptoSlate, CointelegraphEC'22 Blockchain Stretching & Squeezing: Manipulating Time For Your Best Interest
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Saar Tochner, Aviv Zohar
In: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'22) A*
🏆 Awarded an Ethereum Foundation bounty