41 citations · 222 across the 22 of their papers we have counts for
24 papers
Security Limits of Mining Before Validation in Nakamoto Consensus
Yifan Zhou, Jiang Xiao, Kaihua Qin
Mining before validation allows miners to extend a newly received block before completing its validity checks, giving them a head start in the race for the next block reward. This…
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…
SCDBench: A Benchmark for LLM-Based Smart Contract Decompilers
Kaihua Qin, Dawn Song, Arthur Gervais
Smart contract decompilation aims to recover high-level source code from bytecode, but evaluating decompilers remains difficult because existing studies use narrow datasets, incons…
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…
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…
What Drives the (In)stability of a Stablecoin?
Yujin Kwon, Kornrapat Pongmala, Kaihua Qin +5
In May 2022, an apparent speculative attack, followed by market panic, led to the precipitous downfall of UST, one of the most popular stablecoins at that time. However, UST is not…
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…
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…
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…
High-Frequency Trading on Decentralized On-Chain Exchanges
Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Christof Ferreira Torres +2
Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) allow parties to participate in financial markets while retaining full custody of their funds. However, the transparency of blockchain-based DEX in c…
Applying Private Information Retrieval to Lightweight Bitcoin Clients
Kaihua Qin, Henryk Hadass, Arthur Gervais +1
Lightweight Bitcoin clients execute a Simple Payment Verification (SPV) protocol to verify the validity of transactions related to a particular user. Currently, lightweight clients…
FileBounty: Fair Data Exchange
Simon Janin, Kaihua Qin, Akaki Mamageishvili +1
Digital contents are typically sold online through centralized and custodian marketplaces, which requires the trading partners to trust a central entity. We present FileBounty, a f…
Attacking the DeFi Ecosystem with Flash Loans for Fun and Profit
Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Benjamin Livshits +1
Credit allows a lender to loan out surplus capital to a borrower. In the traditional economy, credit bears the risk that the borrower may default on its debt, the lender hence requ…