Yuzhe Tang Associate Professor Dept. of EECS, Syracuse University 4206 Center of Science and Technology, Syracuse, 13244-4100 Email: ytang100 [at] syr [dot] edu C.V.: [webpage],[pdf] @Twitter, Github, Scholar, LinkedIn

Research Interests

My research mission aims to understand, enable and verify the systems security of digital infrastructures used in high-impact or emerging application domains.

Toward the goal, I am interested in cybersecurity, systems, and interdisciplinary research in decentralized systems (like blockchains and smart contracts), open-source software ecosystems, and other emerging domains. My research often addresses technical challenges as follows:

• Security analysis and vulnerability discovery: [USENIX Security 24], [CCS 21]

• Provable security and economics of security: IEEE S&P 25

• Security-oriented measurement and cyber-crimes: [Euro S&P 23], [IMC 21], [NDSS 21]

• Perf. optimization & workload analysis: [TSE 23], [FSE 21], [Middleware 20], [ICDE 19]

• Secure data storage: [ACSAC 14], [EDBT 14], [TPDS 13], [ICDCS 08]

• Data privacy: [TKDE 15], [ICDCS 14], [CIKM 11]

• Security/systems education: [BADD labs], [FuSSIL labs]

My projects are generously supported by National Science Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, Intel, etc.

My research results in patches in popular open-source software, such as Ethereum Go client [Geth 1.11.4].

Recent Publications

Underline: students advised by me.

• S&P'25: “Asymmetric Mempool DoS Security: Formal Definitions and Provable Secure Designs”, AR=14.2%, Wanning Ding, Yuzhe Tang, Yibo Wang

• USENIX Security'24: “Understanding Ethereum Mempool Security under Asymmetric DoS by Symbolized Stateful Fuzzing”, AR=14.5%, Yibo Wang, Yuzhe Tang, Kai Li, Wanning Ding, Zhihua Yang. [pdf], [slides]

• WWW'24: “Characterizing Ethereum Upgradable Smart Contracts and Their Security Implications”, AR=20.2%, Xiaofan Li, Jin Yang, Jiaqi Chen, Yuzhe Tang, Xing Gao. [preprint], [slides]

• Euro S&P'23: “Understanding the Security Risks of Decentralized Exchanges by Uncovering Unfair Trades in the Wild”, AR=35.7%, Jiaqi Chen, Yibo Wang, Yuxuan Zhou, Wanning Ding , Yuzhe Tang, X. Wang, Kai Li. [preprint], [slides], [2-page slides]

• CCS'21: “DETER: Denial of Ethereum Txpool sERvices”, AR=22%, Kai Li, Yibo Wang, Yuzhe Tang. [pdf], [slides], [talk], [poster], [Patch@Geth-1.11.4], [CVE-2022-23327], [CVE-2022-23328]

• 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. [pdf], [slides], [demo1], [demo2]

• IMC'21: “TopoShot: Uncovering Ethereum's Network Topology Leveraging Replacement Transactions”, AR=28%, Kai Li, Yuzhe Tang, Jiaqi Chen, Yibo Wang, Xianghong Liu. [pdf], [slides], [poster], [open dataset], [talk@IMC’21]

• 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. [pdf], [extended version], [html], [slides]

• Middleware'21 (Industrial track): “Authenticated Key-Value Stores with Hardware Enclaves”, Yuzhe Tang, Kai Li, Q. Zhang, J. Xu, J. Chen. [pdf], [extended version] [slides]

• Middleware'20: “Cost-Effective Data Feeds to Blockchains via Workload-Adaptive Data Replication”, AR=25.2%, Kai Li, Yuzhe Tang, Jiaqi Chen, Zhehu Yuan, C. Xu, J. Xu. [pdf], [extended version], [slides], [talk@Middleware’20], [code]

• ICDE'19: “GEM^2-Tree: A Gas-Efficient Structure for Authenticated Range Queries in Blockchain”, Full Paper, AR=26.8%, C. Zhang, C. Xu, J. Xu, Yuzhe Tang, B. Choi. [pdf]

Full list of publications: [link], [DBLP].

Open-source Software

• BADD Labs: Hands-on labs for Blockchain And Dapp Development: [Github repo.], [website]

• Secondary index on HBase: [Github repo.]

• Intel SGX emulator by Linux kernel module: [Github repo.]

Advising

I am fortunate and grateful to work with the following bright Ph.D. students.

• Yibo Wang [link]: Security'24, FSE'21, TSE'23; S&P'25, IMC'21, CCS'21

• Jiaqi Chen [link]: WWW'24, WWW'24 (short), Euro S&P'23; NDSS'21, IMC'21, FSE'21, Middleware'20

• Wanning Ding [link]: S&P'25, Ethereum Protocol Fellowship’22; Security’24

• Zhihua Yang [link]: Security’24

• Jin Yang [link]: WWW'24

• Yuxuan Zhou [link]: WWW’24 (short);

Alumni:

• Kai Li (Ph.D.) [link]: Tenure-track Assistant Professor at San Diego State Univ. (2022 NortonLifeLock Fellowship finalist, internship at IBM Research; Ethereum academic grant awardee)

[Link] to our FullStack Security Lab (FSSL).

Teaching

• CSE643 (2024): Computer Security [website]

• CIS/FIN629 (2022/2021/2020/2019/2018): Blockchain Foundations and Applications. [website] [lectures] [hands-on labs]

• CSE384 (2023/2022/2019/2018/2017): Systems and network programming. [website]

• CIS628/428 (2019): Introduction to applied cryptography. [website], [lecture notes]

• CIS655 (2016/2015/2014): Advanced computer architecture. [website]

• CIS700 (2015): Research seminar. [website]