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!

News.

• Aug 21

  We are hiring students at all levels and are also open to interns.

Members.

Friends of the Lab.

Papers.

• [30]

  Inequality in the Age of Pseudonymity

  Authors: Aviv Yaish, Nir Chemaya, Lin William Cong, Dahlia Malkhi

  In: Proceedings of the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2026)

• [29]

  Perils of Parallelism: Transaction Fee Mechanisms Under Execution Uncertainty

  Authors: Sarisht Wadhwa, Aviv Yaish, Fan Zhang, Kartik Nayak

  In: Proceedings of the 35th USENIX Security Symposium (2026)

• [28]

  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 (2026)

• [27]

  Persistent BitTorrent Trackers

  Authors: François-Xavier Wicht, Zhengwei Tong, Shunfan Zhou, Hang Yin, Aviv Yaish

  In: Proceedings of the IEEE 11th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (2026)

• [26]

  Platform Building With Fake Consumers: On Double Dippers and Airdrop Farmers

  Authors: Hanna Hałaburda, Ben Livshits, Aviv Yaish

  In: Management Science, minor revision (2026)

• [25]

  Transaction Fee Mechanisms Robust to Welfare-Increasing Collusion

  Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish

  In: Games and Economic Behavior (2026)

• [24]

  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 (2026)

• [23]

  FISSION: Label Augmentation for Bot Detection

  Authors: Sen Yang, Ignacy Nieweglowski, Aviv Yaish

  In: ResearchGate (2026)

• [22]

  Freemium Is All You Need

  Authors: Maxim Bichuch, Aviv Yaish

  In: arXiv (2026)

• [21]

  Order Auctions with Private Position Preferences

  Authors: Ruijie Wang, Aviv Yaish

  In: arXiv (2026)

• [20]

  Authenticated Data Structures for Dynamic Workloads

  Authors: Ziheng (Tom) Shangguan, Aviv Yaish, Dahlia Malkhi

  In: arXiv (2026)

• [19]

  Modern Portfolio Theory in the Crypto-Wilderness

  Authors: Ivan Vynyavskyy, Stefan Kitzler, Bernhard Haslhofer, Aviv Yaish

  In: arXiv (2026)

• [18]

  Your Loss is My Gain: Low Stake Attacks on Liquid Staking Pools

  Authors: Sen Yang, Aviv Yaish, Arthur Gervais, Fan Zhang

  In: arXiv (2026)

• [17]

  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)

• [16]

  PoliFi Tokens and the Trump Effect

  Authors: Ignacy Nieweglowski, Aviv Yaish, Fahad Saleh, Fan Zhang

  In: arXiv (2025)

• [15]

  Quantifying Inequality in Blockchain Networks

  Authors: Nir Chemaya, Aviv Yaish, Shahar Yacouel, Dahlia Malkhi, Lin William Cong

  In: SSRN (2025)

• [14]

  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

  In: arXiv (2025)

• [13]

  Barriers to Collusion-resistant Transaction Fee Mechanisms

  Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish

  In: Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (2024)

• [12]

  Discrete & Bayesian Transaction Fee Mechanisms

  Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish

  In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Mathematical Research for Blockchain Economy (2024)

• [11]

  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 (2024)

  Awards: Flashbots Bounty; Ethereum Foundation Bounty

• [10]

  Incentives in the Ether: Practical Cryptocurrency Economics & Security

  Authors: Aviv Yaish

  In: Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference (2024)

• [9]

  Suboptimality in DeFi

  Authors: Aviv Yaish, Maya Dotan, Kaihua Qin, Aviv Zohar, Arthur Gervais

  In: The 4th Annual Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research Conference (2024)

  Award: 4th Annual CBER Conference Best Paper Award

• [8]

  Strategic Vote Timing in Elections With Public Tallies

  Authors: Aviv Yaish, Svetlana Abramova, Rainer Böhme

  In: arXiv (2024)

• [7]

  Scheduling With Time Discounts

  Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish

  In: arXiv (2024)

• [6]

  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 Web Conference (2024)

• [5]

  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 (2023)

  Award: ACM CCS 2023 Distinguished Paper Award

• [4]

  The Vulnerable Nature of Decentralized Governance in DeFi

  Authors: Maya Dotan, Aviv Yaish, Hsin-Chu Yin, Eytan Tsytkin, Aviv Zohar

  In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Decentralized Finance and Security (2023)

• [3]

  Airdrops: Giving Money Away is Harder than it Seems

  Authors: Johnnatan Messias, Aviv Yaish, Benjamin Livshits

  In: arXiv (2023)

• [2]

  Correct Cryptocurrency ASIC Pricing: Are Miners Overpaying?

  Authors: Aviv Yaish, Aviv Zohar

  In: Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (2023)

• [1]

  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 (2022)

  Award: Ethereum Foundation Bounty

Selected Media Coverage.

• 2024

  Blockworks. "What would it cost me to break Ethereum?"

• 2023

  CoinMarketCap. "A Look Back in Time: Ethereum"

• 2022

  International Business Times. "F2Pool Boss Talks About Suspected Foul Play In Ethereum Mining System"

• 2022

  CryptoSlate. "Researchers say they discovered consensus level attack on Ethereum — miners cheating the system to earn more"

• 2022

  Cointelegraph. "F2Pool co-founder responds to allegations it's cheating the Ethereum POW system"