I'm a 5th year PhD candidate, part of Ittay Eyal's group at the Technion, Israel. I'm also a member of the Technion Hiroshi Fujiwara Cyber Security Research Center and the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts.

My research focuses on security of incentive-based blockchain systems. Previous projects included identifying and analyzing attacks when transaction fees comprise a substantial part of the mining reward; realizing bribe attacks on the HTLC smart-contract, and proposing a provably-secure and incentive-compatible fix; extending the blockchain design space by introducing tunable proof-of-work, reducing system wastefulness; and, constructing a contract for future transaction reservation.

I am currently teaching Principles and Tools in Computer Security for the third time, a relatively-new course that I co-authored. I was honored to be recognized as a distinguished teaching assistant for four times.

Check below for recent events:

LedgerHedger : Gas Reservation for Smart-Contract Security

Itay Tsabary, Alex Manuskin, and Ittay Eyal

Posted on February 3, 2022

TL;DR: Prominent smart contracts, e.g., roll-ups, critically rely on timely confirmations of their transactions. Sadly, that’s not how blockchain works, as confirmation times depend on transactions fees, where the required fee is determined by the volatile fee market. We present LedgerHedger, the first smart contract that facilitates a reservation for... [Read More]
Tags: hedging gas transaction fees game theory cryptocurrency smart contracts

MAD-HTLC Accepted to IEEE S&P 2021

Posted on March 29, 2021

We are excited about the MAD-HTLC paper: it identifies a new HTLC attack variation that applies for Bitcoin-like systems as well, and not just Ethereum; it shows the attack costs are substantially lower than what was previously thought; and, it introduces the MAD-HTLC solution, disincentivizing any of above attacks. [Read More]