Economic Security in Decentralized Systems and Beyond
Research Seminar Series
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Date
21 Apr 2026
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Organiser
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, PolyU
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Time
10:30 - 12:00
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Venue
CD304
Speaker
Prof. Yuzhe Tang
Remarks
If you have enquiries regarding E-certificate after the seminar, please contact david.kuo@polyu.edu.hk.
Summary
Public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum underpin today’s multi-trillion-dollar economy. Blockchain is a native asset-management system, where its security directly impacts financial risks and is critical for asset owners. The interplay between cybersecurity and economics in blockchain systems introduces distinct technical challenges and opens up new design opportunities.
Our recent research tackles these challenges by discovering, understanding, and mitigating “economic design flaws” with provable security across blockchains’ infrastructure and application layers. At the infrastructure layer, we uncover cost-asymmetric denial-of-service vulnerabilities in Ethereum’s transaction admission-control subsystems, including mempools (CCS'21) and RPC services (NDSS'21). We advanced the field with semantic fuzzing for automated vulnerability discovery (USENIX Security'24) and provably secure defenses (IEEE S&P'25), with code patches integrated into Ethereum clients. At the application layer, we investigated financial risks, uncovering unfair trades and flaws in compositional smart contracts (Euro S&P'23) and analyzing on-blockchain misuses of leaked private keys (WWW'24).
Keynote Speaker
Prof. Yuzhe Tang
Associate Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Syracuse University, USA
Dr. Yuzhe Tang is an associate professor in the Department of EECS at Syracuse University. His research interest is cyber-security and distributed systems, with focused topics on vulnerability discovery, security analysis, defenses of provable security, security measurement, cyber-crimes, and performance optimization. His research aims at understanding, enabling, and verifying the systems security against design flaws in distributed systems in high-impact or emerging application domains, such as blockchains and decentralized applications. His recent blockchain research has been published on IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, CCS, NDSS, FSE, WWW, IMC, ICDE, Euro S&P, etc. His research also creates real-world impacts, with the code patch adopted by the mainstream open-source projects. He received the Best Paper award in IEEE Cloud 2012 and in ACM/IEEE CCGrid 2015, and the Ethereum Foundation academic grant awards. He is a speaker at the Science of Blockchain Conference, SBC 2023 and 2024, and NTU Blockchain Symposium 2024. He obtains his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech.
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