I am on the academic job market this year.

Fan Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Cornell University, advised by Prof. Ari Juels. His research interest is in building secure systems that empower and protect their users from insecure and centralized infrastructure, by leveraging cryptography, blockchains, and trusted execution environments (TEEs).

His Ph.D. thesis focuses on a principled composition of on-chain and off-chain components to enable provably secure, efficient, and decentralized systems. His works have been featured in Forbes, MIT Tech Review, IEEE Spectrum, CoinDesk, BitcoinMagazine, and numerous blockchain news outlets. Several of his works have been adopted by industry and deployed in the wild. He is a member of IC3 and a recipient of an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship for 2018-2020. Before joining Cornell, he received his Bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University.

Recent News

NEW

Mar 30, 2020: DECO accepted to CCS 2020!

NEW

Jan 08, 2020: Real World Crypto (RWC) video on DECO is now available online.

Oct 25, 2019: I visited ETH Zurich and presented "Connecting Blockchains to the Real World".

Oct 21, 2019: I presented Paralysis Proofs at ACM AFT 2019 at Zurich, Switzerland.

Sep 20, 2019: I visited IBM Waston Center and presented DECO (Decenetralized Oracles).

Sep 01, 2019: Two papers (CHURP, Tesseract) are accepted to ACM CCS'19! See you all in London!

Aug 02, 2019: "Paralysis Proofs: Secure Access-Structure Updates for Cryptocurrencies and More" is accepted to ACM AFT'19!

Apr 01, 2019: "Ekiden: A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contract Execution" is accepted to EuroS&P'19!

Nov 01, 2018: Town Crier is acquired by ChainLink!

Mar 30, 2018: I'm awarded the IBM PhD Fellowship Award for 2018-2020.

Mar 02, 2018: I presented Paralysis Proof at the 5th Bitcoin workshop @ Financial Crypto 2018 in Curacao.

Awards

2018-2020 IBM PhD Fellowship Award

Publications

M. Kelkar, F. Zhang, S. Goldfeder, and A. Juels. Order-Fairness for Byzantine Consensus. In submission.

F. Zhang, S. K. D. Maram, H. Malvai, S. Goldfeder, and A. Juels. DECO: Liberating Web Data Using Decentralized Oracles for TLS. In ACM CCS, 2020. To appear.

S. K. D. Maram*, F. Zhang*, L. Wang, A. Low, Y. Zhang, A. Juels, and D. Song. CHURP: Dynamic-Committee Proactive Secret Sharing. In ACM CCS, 2019. * indicates equal contribution.

Media coverage by: MIT Tech Review China

I. Bentov, Y. Ji, F. Zhang, Y. Li, X. Zhao, L. Breidenbach, P. Daian, and A. Juels. Tesseract: Real-Time Cryptocurrency Exchange using Trusted Hardware. In ACM CCS, 2019.

R. Cheng, F. Zhang, J. Kos, W. He, N. Hynes, N. M. Johnson, A. Juels, A. Miller, and D. Song. Ekiden: A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contracts. In IEEE EuroS&P, 2019.

Media coverage by: Forbes

F. Zhang, P. Daian, I. Bentov, I. Miers, and A. Juels. Paralysis Proofs: Secure Dynamic Access Structures for Cryptocurrency Custody and More. In ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT), 2019.

Media coverage by: BitcoinMagazine

E. Cecchetti, F. Zhang, Y. Ji, A. E. Kosba, A. Juels, and E. Shi. Solidus: Confidential Distributed Ledger Transactions via PVORM. In ACM CCS, 2017.

F. Tramèr, F. Zhang, H. Lin, Jean-Pierre Hubaux, A. Juels, and E. Shi. Sealed-Glass Proofs: Using Transparent Enclaves to Prove and Sell Knowledge. In IEEE EuroS&P, 2017.

F. Zhang, I. Eyal, R. Escriva, A. Juels, and R. van Renesse. REM: Resource-Efficient Mining for Blockchains. In USENIX Security, 2017.

Media coverage by: IEEE Spectrum

F. Zhang, E. Cecchetti, K. Croman, A. Juels, and E. Shi. Town Crier: An Authenticated Data Feed for Smart Contracts. In ACM CCS, 2016.

Media coverage by: MIT Tech Review , Forbes , BitcoinExchangeGuide , Unhashed , CoinDesk , MIT Technology Review , ETHNews

F. Tramèr, F. Zhang, A. Juels, M. K. Reiter, and T. Ristenpart. Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs. In USENIX Security, 2016.

L. Yang, Y. Cui, F. Zhang, J. P. Pollak, S. Belongie, and D. Estrin. PlateClick: Bootstrapping Food Preferences Through an Adaptive Visual Interface. In ACM CIKM, 2015.

Journal articles

F. Zhang, W. He, R. Cheng, J. Kos, N. Hynes, N. Johnson, A. Juels, A. Miller, and D. Song. The Ekiden Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving,Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contracts. To appear in IEEE Security & Privacy, Volume 18, Issue 3.

Talks (Selected)

Feb, 2020, Stanford Blockchain Conference (SBC'20), Stanford University, "DECO: Liberating Web Data Using Decentralized Oracles for TLS".
Jan, 2020, Real World Crypto 2020, New York City, "DECO: Liberating Web Data Using Decentralized Oracles for TLS". Slides available here.
Nov, 2019, CISPA-Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany, "Connecting Blockchains with the Real World".
Nov, 2019, ACM CCS'19, London, UK, "CHURP: Proactive Secret Sharing with Dynamic Committee".
Oct, 2019, ETH Zurich, "Connecting Blockchains with the Real World".
Oct, 2019. ACM AFT, Paralysis Proofs.
Sep, 2019. IBM Watson Research Center, IBM PhD Fellow Talk, DECO: Liberating Web Data Using Decentralized Oracles for TLS.
Jan, 2019. Northeastern University, Cybersecurity Speaker Series, on Ekiden and CHURP.
Nov, 2018. MIT, CSAIL, on Trusted Hardware and Blockchain Hybridization.
Oct, 2018. New York University, CS Colloquium, on Trusted Hardware and Blockchain Hybridization.

Software

Here are some of the open-source artifacts from my research:

Star Town Crier: an SGX-based authenticated data feeds for smart contracts.
Star mbedTLS-SGX: a port of mbedtls to the SGX environment.
Star CHURP: dynamic-committee proactive secret sharing.

See more on my GitHub page @bl4ck5un.

Media Coverage

MIT Tech Review China reported on CHURP by MIT Tech Review China on Mar 27, 2019
Blockchain smart contracts are finally good for something in the real world by MIT Tech Review on Nov 19, 2018
Cornell's Town Crier Acquired By Chainlink To Expand Decentralized Oracle Network by Forbes on Nov 1, 2018
Chainlink Blockchain Company Acquires Cornell’s Town Crier to Bolster Native Smart Contract Network by BitcoinExchangeGuide on Nov 2, 2018
Chainlink Acquires Town Crier, a Hardware-Based Oracle by Unhashed on Nov 3, 2018
Big Hitter Crypto Funds Pile Into Privacy-Enhanced Smart Contract Startup Oasis Labs by Forbes on Jul 9, 2018
Cornell IC3 Researchers Propose Solution to Bitcoin's Multisig "Paralysis" Problem by BitcoinMagazine on Jan 19, 2018
The Ridiculous Amount of Energy It Takes to Run Bitcoin by IEEE Spectrum on Sep 28, 2017
Trust Your Oracle? Cornell Launches Tool for Confidential Blockchain Queries by CoinDesk on May 17, 2017
How Encrypted Weather Data Could Help Corporate Blockchain Dreams Come True by MIT Technology Review on May 11, 2017
Town Crier Service Delivers Solid Data To Coders by ETHNews on May 11, 2017

Professional Activities

PC Member: BITCOIN'18
Reviewer: USENIX Security (2016), ACM Computing Surveys (2018), TCC (2019)

Teaching

2015 Fall, (Part Time) TA for CS 5435: Security and Privacy in the Wild
2015 Spring, TA for CS 5300: Large-scale Information Systems
2014 Fall, TA for CS 4410: Operating Systems

Contact

fanz at cs.cornell.edu
2 West Loop Road, New York, NY 10044