Fan Zhang

Assistant Professor
Dept of Computer Science, Yale University

Bio

I’m an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Yale University. 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. I’m also a faculty advisor at Chainlink Labs.

My research focuses on the security, privacy and scalability of decentralized systems, in particular those enabled by blockchains and trusted execution environments (TEEs). To learn more, you can check out my research page and publications.

Updates

  • OCT 23 He-HTLC: Revisiting Incentives in HTLC is accepted to NDSS 2023. Congrats to Sarisht and Jannis!
  • AUG 26 zkBridge: Trustless Cross-chain Bridges Made Practical is accepted to CCS 2022.
  • AUG 12 We wrote a blog post on incentive attacks in HTLCs and our solution He-HTLC.
  • AUG 01 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 29 Received three grants from Ethereum Foundation.
  • MAY 05 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 22 Our work on empirical analysis of EIP-1559 is presented at ETHconomics @ Devconnect 2022. Recording available here.
  • MAR 11 Our paper on empirical analysis of EIP-1559 is accepted in CCS 2022.
  • MAR 16 I will join the TPC of Oakland'23.
  • DEC 01 I will join the TPC of CCS'22 and DeFi'22.
  • MAY 01 I will join the TPC of PET 2022 and AFT 2021.
Older ones...
  • NOV 13 I joined the TPC of PET 2021 and CCS 2021.
  • NOV 13 I presented DECO at CCS'20.
  • OCT 01 I presented CanDID at the annual convention of Chinese Institute of Engineers - Greater New York Chapter.
  • OCT 01 I presented CanDID at Empire Hacking (organized by Trail of Bits).
  • OCT 01 I presented DECO at W3C Credential Community Group (CCG).
  • OCT 01 I joined the TPC of Financial Crypto 2021 and DeFi'21 workshop.
  • SEP 30 CanDID paper is accepted to IEEE S&P 2021!
  • AUG 29 DECO acquisition by ChainLink is announced!
  • JUL 29 CanDID, our latest work on Decentralized Identity (DID) is available online.
  • MAR 30 DECO accepted to CCS 2020!
  • JAN 08 Real World Crypto (RWC) video on DECO is now available online.
  • OCT 25 I visited ETH Zurich and presented “Connecting Blockchains to the Real World”.
  • OCT 21 I presented Paralysis Proofs at ACM AFT 2019 at Zurich, Switzerland.
  • SEP 20 I visited IBM Waston Center and presented DECO (Decenetralized Oracles)."
  • SEP 01 Two papers (CHURP, Tesseract) are accepted to ACM CCS'19! See you all in London!
  • AUG 02 “Paralysis Proofs: Secure Access-Structure Updates for Cryptocurrencies and More” is accepted to ACM AFT'19!
  • APR 01 “Ekiden: A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contract Execution” is accepted to EuroS&P'19!
  • NOV 01 Town Crier is acquired by ChainLink!
  • MAR 30 I’m awarded the IBM PhD Fellowship Award for 2018-2020.
  • MAR 02 I presented Paralysis Proof at the 5th Bitcoin workshop @ Financial Crypto 2018 in Curacao.
  • AUG 02 Solidus: Confidential Distributed Ledger Transactions via PVORM is accepted to CCS'17.
  • AUG 13 I was invited to present Town Crier at Silicon Valley Ethereum Meetup.
  • AUG 18 I presented REM at USENIX Security 2017, Vancouver, Canada.
  • JUL 10 Intern at Intel Labs this summer.
  • MAY 15 Town Crier is officially live!
  • MAY 11 REM: Resource-Efficient Mining for Blockchains paper is accepted to USENIX Security'17. Available here.
  • OCT 17 Sealed-Glass Proofs: Using Transparent Enclaves to Prove and Sell Knowledge is accepted to EuroS&P ‘17.
  • JUL 22 Town Crier: An Authenticated Data Feed for Smart Contracts is accepted to ACM CCS'16.
  • MAY 13 Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs is accepted to USENIX Security'16.

In the News

Some of the projects are featured in the news.