Associate Professor
4-193 CST
ytang100@syr.edu
315.443.4350
Degree:
- Ph.D. Computer Science, Georgia Tech
Lab/ Center/ Institute affiliation:
Full Stack Security Lab (FSSL)
Areas of Expertise:
- Cyber-security and privacy
- Systems security
- Decentralized systems and blockchains
- Cryptocurrencies and finance security
- Applied formal methods and software testing
I am interested in the intersection between cybersecurity and systems. My research mission is to bring systems security and efficiency to large-scale, emerging/evolving infrastructures and applications. 1) On the cyber-security front, I am interested in applying formal methods, protocol analysis, automated program analysis, and software testing techniques to discover vulnerabilities, detect attacks, and design secure systems. I am also interested in the security-oriented measurement of large-scale systems. 2) On the systems front, I am interested in workload analysis, benchmarking, design of optimization schemes and middleware in various host systems.
My recent research focuses on decentralized systems like public blockchains. I tackle the systems security/efficiency challenges at different blockchain layers, including application-level DeFi protocol, smart contracts, down to the systems-level consensus implementations, P2P networking, and web3.0 infrastructures. I am particularly interested in discovering and fixing design flaws in blockchains and DeFi applications using formal methods. My recent research on blockchain mempool security is well-recognized in the Ethereum/blockchain developer community. Besides, I am developing and disseminating blockchain educational materials.
In the past, I worked on confidential computing, trusted execution environments, applied privacy-preserving protocols, and cloud security.
Honors and Awards:
- Ethereum Foundation Academic Grant Awardee, 2023
- Ethereum Foundation Academic Grant Awardee, 2022
- Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) Visiting Faculty Research Award, 2017
- Best Paper Award, 15th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing, 2015
- Best Paper Award, 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing, 2012
- Tung’s Oriental Scholarship, Tung’s Oriental, 2008
Selected Publications:
- USENIX Security’24: “Understanding Ethereum Mempool Security under Asymmetric DoS by Symbolized Stateful Fuzzing”, Yibo Wang, Yuzhe Tang, Kai Li, Wanning Ding, Zhihua Yang.
- WWW’24: “Characterizing Ethereum Upgradable Smart Contracts and Their Security Implications”, AR=20.2%, Xiaofan Li, Jin Yang, Jiaqi Chen, Yuzhe Tang, Xing Gao.
- CCS’21: “DETER: Denial of Ethereum Txpool sERvices”, AR=22%, Kai Li, Yibo Wang, Yuzhe Tang.
- NDSS’21: “As Strong As Its Weakest Link: How to Break (and Fix) Blockchain DApps at RPC Service”, AR=15.2%, Kai Li, Jiaqi Chen, Xianghong Liu, Yuzhe Tang, X. Wang, X. Luo.
- IMC’21: “TopoShot: Uncovering Ethereum’s Network Topology Leveraging Replacement Transactions”, AR=28%, Kai Li, Yuzhe Tang, Jiaqi Chen, Yibo Wang, Xianghong Liu.
- FSE’21: “iBatch: Saving Ethereum Fees via Secure and Cost-Effective Batching of Smart-Contract Invocations”, AR=24.5%, Yibo Wang, Qi Zhang, Kai Li, Yuzhe Tang, Jiaqi Chen, X. Luo, T. Chen.