Fan Zhang

Assistant Professor

Dept of Computer Science, Yale University

• Email: f.zhang at yale.edu
• Office: 51 Prospect St, New Haven, CT
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Secure Decentralized Systems Lab

The mission of Secure Decentralized Systems Lab is to enable next-gen digital services with security, privacy, resiliency, and fairness as first-order goals.

We focus on two key enabling techniques: decentralized ledgers (aka blockchains) and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Our approach combines methods from applied cryptography, distributed computing, mechanism design, etc., to securely scale up their performance, enable broad applications, and combat novel security problems arising in new applications.

• Securely connect blockchains to other systems
  • “Oracles”: DECO (CCS'20), Town Crier (CCS'16)
  • Decentralized identity: CanDID (Oakland'21)
  • Cross-chain communication: zkBridge (CCS’22), He-HTLC (NDSS'23)
• Frontrunning mitigation
  • Aequitas (Crypto'20), Tesseract (CCS'19)
• Privacy-preserving protocols for blockchains
  • Solidus (CCS'17), CHURP (CCS'19), Ekiden (EuroSP'19)
• Security against privileged parties in blockchains
  • He-HTLC: Revisiting Incentive Attacks in HTLC (NDSS'23)
• Market congestion & fee design
  • EIP-1559 study (CCS'22)
• Trusted hardware and blockchain hybridization
  • Proof of useful work (Usenix'17)
  • Sealed-glass proofs (EuroSP'17)
  • Tesseract (CCS'19)
• Anonymous communication (e.g., dining cryptographers)

Industry adoption

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

Acknowledgements

My research is currently supported by grants from Ethereum Foundation and NSF.