Understanding and Hardening Blockchain Systems Security under DoS Attacks
Hosted by Prof Prateek Saxena, Co-Director of Crystal Centre, in collaboration with Dr Tang Yuzhe from Syracuse University on the following seminar talk.
Abstract:
Ethereum is the largest smart-contract platform and second-largest cryptocurrency only after Bitcoin. Under the hood, Ethereum is a peer-to-peer network where miner nodes come to a consensus and decide what transactions to include in the blockchain. In practice, Ethereum's P2P network receives transactions sent from millions of web clients and propagates them to the tens of thousands of miner nodes. While the blockchain-to-client communication channel is a part of the system's critical path, its security is understudied in the existing research literature. This talk presents our recent research examining Ethereum systems security under the denial-of-service attack vectors (CCS'21, NDSS'21, and IMC'21). The security vulnerabilities discovered in these works have been confirmed and then fixed by the Ethereum developer community.
Biodata:
Dr Yuzhe Tang is an assistant professor in the EECS department at Syracuse University. He is broadly interested in cybersecurity and distributed systems. His current research focuses on infrastructure security and efficiency in emerging applications, such as blockchains and cloud computing. His research results are published in top cyber-security and systems conferences, including ACM CCS, NDSS, ACM IMC, FSE, IEEE ICDE, ACM Middleware, ACSAC, ICDCS, EDBT, etc. In addition, his research results have been reorganized through various bug bounty programs and influenced code patches in the blockchain developer community. Dr. Tang earns his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology and his B.Sc. in Computer Science and Technology from Fudan University, China. He serves in technical program committees in venues including WWW, IEEE ICDCS, IEEE TKDE, ACM ToCS, etc. He is the recipient of the Best Paper award in IEEE Cloud 2012, the Best Paper award in ACM/IEEE CCGrid 2015, and AFRL visiting faculty research award 2017.