Fan Zhang

Assistant Professor
Dept of Computer Science, Duke University

About Me

I’m an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Duke University. 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 recent projects and publications.

My research has led to direct industry adoption. Town Crier and DECO have been licensed to Chainlink (news, news). Ekiden is used in Oasis Labs’ products. In my separate capacity, I’m a security researcher at Chainlink Labs.

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.

Recent News

  • NEW
    May 2022: 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.
  • NEW
    Apr 2022: Our work on empirical analysis of EIP-1559 is presented at ETHconomics @ Devconnect 2022. Recording available here.
  • NEW
    Mar 2022: Our paper on empirical analysis of EIP-1559 is accepted in CCS 2022.
  • NEW
    Mar 2022: I will join the TPC of Oakland'23.
  • Dec 2021: I will join the TPC of CCS'22 and DeFi'22.
  • May 2021: I will join the TPC of PET 2022 and AFT 2021.
  • Older ones...
  • Nov 2020: I joined the TPC of PET 2021 and CCS 2021.
  • Nov 2020: I presented DECO at CCS'20.
  • Oct 2020: I presented CanDID at the annual convention of Chinese Institute of Engineers - Greater New York Chapter.
  • Oct 2020: I presented CanDID at Empire Hacking (organized by Trail of Bits).
  • Oct 2020: I presented DECO at W3C Credential Community Group (CCG).
  • Oct 2020: I joined the TPC of Financial Crypto 2021 and DeFi'21 workshop.
  • Sep 2020: CanDID paper is accepted to IEEE S&P 2021!
  • Aug 2020: DECO acquisition by ChainLink is announced!
  • Jul 2020: CanDID, our latest work on Decentralized Identity (DID) is available online.
  • Mar 2020: DECO accepted to CCS 2020!
  • Jan 2020: Real World Crypto (RWC) video on DECO is now available online.
  • Oct 2019: I visited ETH Zurich and presented “Connecting Blockchains to the Real World”.
  • Oct 2019: I presented Paralysis Proofs at ACM AFT 2019 at Zurich, Switzerland.
  • Sep 2019: I visited IBM Waston Center and presented DECO (Decenetralized Oracles)."
  • Sep 2019: Two papers (CHURP, Tesseract) are accepted to ACM CCS'19! See you all in London!
  • Aug 2019: “Paralysis Proofs: Secure Access-Structure Updates for Cryptocurrencies and More” is accepted to ACM AFT'19!
  • Apr 2019: “Ekiden: A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contract Execution” is accepted to EuroS&P'19!
  • Nov 2018: Town Crier is acquired 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: Solidus: Confidential Distributed Ledger Transactions via PVORM is accepted to CCS'17.
  • Aug 2017: I was invited to present Town Crier at Silicon Valley Ethereum Meetup.
  • Aug 2017: I presented REM at USENIX Security 2017, Vancouver, Canada.
  • 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.

Media Coverage