Economics & Security Lab

The CODA building, which houses Georgia Tech's School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and our lab.

About. At the Economics & Security Lab, we like breaking things: pushing systems to their limits and understanding how they fail is fundamental to making them robust. This drives our research into the economics and security of distributed systems and AI at Georgia Tech.

Hiring. We are hiring students at all levels, and are also open to interns. Get in touch!

Prospective students looking to learn more about my mentoring style can reach out to Sarisht Wadhwa and Ruijie Wang.

News

  • Sep 8 The lab thanks Zulip for offering a free plan for researchers.
  • Aug 21 We are hiring students at all levels and are also open to interns.

Members

Friends of the Lab

Papers

  1. AAAI'26 Inequality in the Age of Pseudonymity
    Authors: Aviv Yaish, Nir Chemaya, Dahlia Malkhi, Lin William Cong
    In: Proceedings of the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
  2. USENIXSEC'26 Perils of Parallelism: Transaction Fee Mechanisms Under Execution Uncertainty
    Authors: Sarisht Wadhwa*, Aviv Yaish*, Fan Zhang, Kartik Nayak (*: equal contribution)
    In: Proceedings of the 35th USENIX Security Symposium
  3. CCS'26 Insecurity Through Obscurity: Veiled Vulnerabilities in Closed-Source Contracts
    Authors: Sen Yang, Kaihua Qin, Aviv Yaish, Fan Zhang
    In: Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
  4. EuroS&P'26 Persistent BitTorrent Trackers
    Authors: François-Xavier Wicht, Zhengwei Tong, Shunfan Zhou, Hang Yin, Aviv Yaish
    In: Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE 11th European Symposium on Security and Privacy
    🏭 Industry collaboration with Phala Network
  5. MS'26 Platform Building With Fake Consumers: On Double Dippers and Airdrop Farmers
    Authors: Hanna Hałaburda, Ben Livshits, Aviv Yaish
    In: minor revision, Management Science
    🏭 Industry collaboration with Matter Labs
  6. GEB'26 Transaction Fee Mechanisms Robust to Welfare-Increasing Collusion
    Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish
    In: Games and Economic Behavior
  7. TNSM'26 SoK: DeFi Lending and Yield Aggregation Protocol Taxonomy, Empirical Measurements, and Security Challenges
    Authors: Arad Kotzer, Tom Azoulay, Yoad Abels, Aviv Yaish, Ori Rottenstreich
    In: IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
  8. 2026 FISSION: Label Augmentation for Bot Detection
    Authors: Sen Yang, Ignacy Nieweglowski, Aviv Yaish
  9. 2026 Freemium Is All You Need
    Authors: Maxim Bichuch, Aviv Yaish
  10. 2026 Order Auctions with Private Position Preferences
    Authors: Ruijie Wang, Aviv Yaish
  11. 2026 Your Loss is My Gain: Low Stake Attacks on Liquid Staking Pools
    Authors: Sen Yang*, Aviv Yaish*, Arthur Gervais, Fan Zhang (*: equal contribution)
  12. 2026 Authenticated Data Structures for Dynamic Workloads
    Authors: Ziheng (Tom) Shangguan, Aviv Yaish, Dahlia Malkhi
  13. 2026 Modern Portfolio Theory in the Crypto-Wilderness
    Authors: Ivan Vynyavskyy, Stefan Kitzler, Bernhard Haslhofer, Aviv Yaish
  14. FC'25 Proophi: A ZKP Market Mechanism
    Authors: Wenhao Wang, Lulu Zhou, Aviv Yaish, Fan Zhang, Ben Fisch, Benjamin Livshits
    In: Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2025
    🏭 Industry collaboration with Matter Labs and Fermah
  15. 2025 Quantifying Inequality in Blockchain Networks
    Authors: Nir Chemaya, Aviv Yaish, Shahar Yacouel, Dahlia Malkhi, Lin William Cong
  16. 2025 PoliFi Tokens and the Trump Effect
    Authors: Ignacy Nieweglowski, Aviv Yaish, Fahad Saleh, Fan Zhang
  17. 2025 Advancing AI Research Assistants with Expert-Involved Learning
    Authors: Tianyu Liu, Simeng Han, Xiao Luo, Hanchen Wang, Biqing Zhu, Rihao Qu, Yufeng Liu, Xinyue Cui, Yuge Wang, Keyi Li, Jiapeng Chen, Aviv Yaish, Yuhang Chen, Minsheng Hao, Chuhan Li, Kexing Li, Arman Cohan, Hua Xu, Mark Gerstein, Hongyu Zhao
  18. EC'24 Barriers to Collusion-resistant Transaction Fee Mechanisms
    Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish
    In: Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
  19. MARBLE'24 Discrete & Bayesian Transaction Fee Mechanisms
    Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish
    In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Mathematical Research for Blockchain Economy
  20. USENIXSEC'24 Speculative Denial-of-Service Attacks in Ethereum
    Authors: Aviv Yaish, Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Aviv Zohar, Arthur Gervais
    In: Proceedings of the 33rd USENIX Security Symposium
    🏆 Awarded a Flashbots bounty
    🏆 Awarded an Ethereum Foundation bounty
    🏆 Ranked 63rd in MLSEC's Normalized Top-100 Security Papers list
    📰 Covered by Blockworks
  21. CBER'24 Suboptimality in DeFi
    Authors: Aviv Yaish, Maya Dotan, Kaihua Qin, Aviv Zohar, Arthur Gervais
    In: The 4th Annual Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research Conference
    🏆 Received the 4th Annual Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research (CBER) Conference's Best Paper Award
  22. WWW'24 Blockchain Censorship
    Authors: Toni Wahrstatter, Jens Ernstberger, Aviv Yaish, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Taro Tsuchiya, Sebastian Steinhorst, Nicholas Cristin, Davor Svetinovic, Mikolaj Barczentewicz, Arthur Gervais
    In: Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2024
  23. WWW'24 Incentives in the Ether: Practical Cryptocurrency Economics & Security
    Authors: Aviv Yaish
    In: Companion Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2024
  24. 2024 Strategic Vote Timing in Elections With Public Tallies
    Authors: Aviv Yaish, Svetlana Abramova, Rainer Böhme
  25. 2024 Scheduling With Time Discounts
    Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish
  26. CCS'23 Uncle Maker: (Time)Stamping Out The Competition
    Authors: Aviv Yaish, Gilad Stern, Aviv Zohar
    In: Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
    🏆 Received the ACM CCS 2023 Distinguished Paper Award
    📰 Covered by International Business Times, CryptoSlate, Cointelegraph
  27. DeFi@CCS'23 The Vulnerable Nature of Decentralized Governance in DeFi
    Authors: Maya Dotan, Aviv Yaish, Hsin-Chu Yin, Eytan Tsytkin, Aviv Zohar
    In: Proceedings of the 2023 Workshop on Decentralized Finance and Security
  28. 2023 Airdrops: Giving Money Away is Harder than it Seems
    Authors: Johnnatan Messias, Aviv Yaish, Benjamin Livshits
    🏭 Industry collaboration with Matter Labs
  29. AFT'23 Correct Cryptocurrency ASIC Pricing: Are Miners Overpaying?
    Authors: Aviv Yaish, Aviv Zohar
    In: Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies
  30. EC'22 Blockchain Stretching & Squeezing: Manipulating Time For Your Best Interest
    Authors: Aviv Yaish, Saar Tochner, Aviv Zohar
    In: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
    🏆 Awarded an Ethereum Foundation bounty

Selected Media Coverage

© 2026 Economics & Security Lab