59 citations · 259 across the 26 of their papers we have counts for
26 papers
Transferable Self-Evolving Playbooks for Agentic Security Auditing
Ziyue Wang, Cheuk Wang Maurice Ng, Chenchen Yu +3
An LLM agent for vulnerability discovery and validation is more than a model. It combines three components: an LLM for code analysis, an agent harness such as Codex or OpenCode for…
When Agents Overtrust Environmental Evidence: An Extensible Agentic Framework for Benchmarking Evidence-Grounding Defects in LLM Agents
Strick Sheng, Ziyue Wang, Liyi Zhou
Large language model agents increasingly operate through environment-facing scaffolds that expose files, web pages, APIs, and logs. These observations influence tool use, state tra…
Can Agent Benchmarks Support Their Scores? Evidence-Supported Bounds for Interactive-Agent Evaluation
Shanshan Gao, Liyi Zhou
Interactive agent benchmarks map an agent run to a binary outcome through outcome checks. When these checks rely on surface level signals or fail to capture the agent's actual acti…
TxRay: Agentic Postmortem of Live Blockchain Attacks
Ziyue Wang, Jiangshan Yu, Kaihua Qin +3
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has turned blockchains into financial infrastructure, allowing anyone to trade, lend, and build protocols without intermediaries, but this openness exp…
Agentic Discovery and Validation of Android App Vulnerabilities
Ziyue Wang, Liyi Zhou
Existing Android vulnerability detection tools overwhelm teams with thousands of low-signal warnings yet uncover few true positives. Analysts spend days triaging these results, cre…
Evasion Under Blockchain Sanctions
Endong Liu, Mark Ryan, Liyi Zhou +1
Sanctioning blockchain addresses has become a common regulatory response to malicious activities. However, enforcement on permissionless blockchains remains challenging due to comp…
AI Agent Smart Contract Exploit Generation
Arthur Gervais, Liyi Zhou
Smart contract vulnerabilities have led to billions in losses, yet finding actionable exploits remains challenging. Traditional fuzzers rely on rigid heuristics and struggle with c…
Decompiling Smart Contracts with a Large Language Model
Isaac David, Liyi Zhou, Dawn Song +2
The widespread lack of broad source code verification on blockchain explorers such as Etherscan, where despite 78,047,845 smart contracts deployed on Ethereum (as of May 26, 2025),…
Blockchain Amplification Attack
Taro Tsuchiya, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin +2
Strategies related to the blockchain concept of Extractable Value (MEV/BEV), such as arbitrage, front-, or back-running create strong economic incentives for network nodes to reduc…
Do you still need a manual smart contract audit?
Isaac David, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin +3
We investigate the feasibility of employing large language models (LLMs) for conducting the security audit of smart contracts, a traditionally time-consuming and costly process. Ou…
Blockchain Censorship
Anton Wahrstätter, Jens Ernstberger, Aviv Yaish +8
Permissionless blockchains promise to be resilient against censorship by a single entity. This suggests that deterministic rules, and not third-party actors, are responsible for de…
Time to Bribe: Measuring Block Construction Market
Anton Wahrstätter, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin +2
With the emergence of Miner Extractable Value (MEV), block construction markets on blockchains have evolved into a competitive arena. Following Ethereum's transition from Proof of…
Enhancing Smart Contract Security Analysis with Execution Property Graphs
Kaihua Qin, Zhe Ye, Zhun Wang +5
Smart contract vulnerabilities have led to significant financial losses, with their increasing complexity rendering outright prevention of hacks increasingly challenging. This tren…
Blockchain Large Language Models
Yu Gai, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin +2
This paper presents a dynamic, real-time approach to detecting anomalous blockchain transactions. The proposed tool, BlockGPT, generates tracing representations of blockchain activ…
Smart Contract and DeFi Security Tools: Do They Meet the Needs of Practitioners?
Stefanos Chaliasos, Marcos Antonios Charalambous, Liyi Zhou +4
The growth of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem built on blockchain technology and smart contracts has led to an increased demand for secure and reliable smart contract de…
Mitigating Decentralized Finance Liquidations with Reversible Call Options
Kaihua Qin, Jens Ernstberger, Liyi Zhou +2
Liquidations in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) are both a blessing and a curse -- whereas liquidations prevent lenders from capital loss, they simultaneously lead to liquidation spir…
SoK: Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Attacks
Liyi Zhou, Xihan Xiong, Jens Ernstberger +7
Within just four years, the blockchain-based Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem has accumulated a peak total value locked (TVL) of more than 253 billion USD. This surge in DeFi…
On How Zero-Knowledge Proof Blockchain Mixers Improve, and Worsen User Privacy
Zhipeng Wang, Stefanos Chaliasos, Kaihua Qin +5
Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) mixers are one of the most widely-used blockchain privacy solutions, operating on top of smart contract-enabled blockchains. We find that ZKP mixers are…
A2MM: Mitigating Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges
Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Arthur Gervais
The asset trading volume on blockchain-based exchanges (DEX) increased substantially since the advent of Automated Market Makers (AMM). Yet, AMMs and their forks compete on the sam…
CeFi vs. DeFi -- Comparing Centralized to Decentralized Finance
Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Yaroslav Afonin +2
To non-experts, the traditional Centralized Finance (CeFi) ecosystem may seem obscure, because users are typically not aware of the underlying rules or agreements of financial asse…
An Empirical Study of DeFi Liquidations: Incentives, Risks, and Instabilities
Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Pablo Gamito +2
Financial speculators often seek to increase their potential gains with leverage. Debt is a popular form of leverage, and with over 39.88B USD of total value locked (TVL), the Dece…
Cyclic Arbitrage in Decentralized Exchanges
Ye Wang, Yan Chen, Haotian Wu +3
Decentralized Exchanges (DEXes) enable users to create markets for exchanging any pair of cryptocurrencies. The direct exchange rate of two tokens may not match the cross-exchange…
On the Just-In-Time Discovery of Profit-Generating Transactions in DeFi Protocols
Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Antoine Cully +2
In this paper, we investigate two methods that allow us to automatically create profitable DeFi trades, one well-suited to arbitrage and the other applicable to more complicated se…
Quantifying Blockchain Extractable Value: How dark is the forest?
Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Arthur Gervais
Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have excelled at financial services. Yet, opportunistic traders extract monetary value from the mesh of decentralized finance (DeFi) smar…