Fan Zhang

Bio

I am a PhD candidate in the department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Under the able advice of Prof. Ari Juels, my research interest is in blockchains, trusted hardware, system security and applied cryptography. I'm particularly interested in understanding and building hybrid systems that enjoy the best of both blockchains and trusted hardware. I am a member of the exciting Initiative for Cryptocurrencies & Contracts (IC3). Before joining Cornell, I earned my bachelor's degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2014.

Recent News

Apr. 2019, Our paper titled Ekiden: A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contract Execution is accepted to EuroS&P'19!
Jan. 2019, Our paper on dynamic-committee secret sharing is now posted online.
Nov. 2018, Town Crier, a trusted hardware-based oracle for smart contracts is aquired 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, I presented REM at USENIX Security 2017, Vancouver, Canada.
Aug. 2017, I was invited to present Town Crier at Silicon Valley Ethereum Meetup.
Aug. 2017, Solidus: Confidential Distributed Ledger Transactions via PVORM is accepted to CCS'17.
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.

Awards

Publications

Sai Krishna Deepak Maram, Fan Zhang, Lun Wang, Andrew Low, Yupeng Zhang, Ari Juels and Dawn Song. CHURP: Dynamic-Committee Proactive Secret Sharing. In submission.
Media coverage by: MIT Tech Review China
Raymond Cheng, Fan Zhang, Jernej Kos, Warren He, Nicholas Hynes, Noah M. Johnson, Ari Juels, Andrew Miller and Dawn Song. Ekiden: a Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contract Execution. In IEEE EuroS&P, 2019.
Media coverage by: Forbes
Fan Zhang, Philip Daian, Iddo Bentov and Ari Juels. Paralysis Proofs: Safe Access-Structure Updates for Cryptocurrencies and More. In ACM AFT (to appear), 2019.
Media coverage by: BitcoinMagazine
Ethan Cecchetti, Fan Zhang, Yan Ji, Ahmed E. Kosba, Ari Juels and Elaine Shi. Solidus: Confidential Distributed Ledger Transactions via PVORM. In ACM CCS, 2017.
Florian Tramèr, Fan Zhang, Huang Lin, Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Ari Juels and Elaine Shi. Sealed-Glass Proofs: Using Transparent Enclaves to Prove and Sell Knowledge. In IEEE EuroS&P, 2017.
Fan Zhang, Ittay Eyal, Robert Escriva, Ari Juels and Robbert van Renesse. REM: Resource-Efficient Mining for Blockchains. In USENIX Security, 2017.
Media coverage by: IEEE Spectrum
Iddo Bentov, Yan Ji, Fan Zhang, Yunqi Li, Xueyuan Zhao, Lorenz Breidenbach, Philip Daian and Ari Juels. Tesseract: Real-Time Cryptocurrency Exchange using Trusted Hardware. In submission.
Fan Zhang, Ethan Cecchetti, Kyle Croman, Ari Juels and Elaine Shi. Town Crier: An Authenticated Data Feed for Smart Contracts. In ACM CCS, 2016.
Media coverage by: Forbes , BitcoinExchangeGuide , Unhashed , CoinDesk , MIT Technology Review , ETHNews
Florian Tramèr, Fan Zhang, Ari Juels, Michael K. Reiter and Thomas Ristenpart. Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs. In USENIX Security, 2016.
Longqi Yang, Yin Cui, Fan Zhang, John P Pollak, Serge Belongie and Deborah Estrin. PlateClick: Bootstrapping Food Preferences Through an Adaptive Visual Interface. In ACM CIKM, 2015.

Software

Here are some of the open-source artifacts from my research: See more on my GitHub page @bl4ck5un.

Media Coverage

Professional Activities

Teaching

Contact