Bio. I research the economics and security of distributed systems. I am 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), and 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, where I also was a lecturer for two courses and received a teaching award. Among other honors, the CBER Forum named me one of the top PhD graduates of 23-24, and I received the CCS Distinguished Paper award, the CBER Best Paper 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