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Prospective PhD Students:

Two fully funded PhD positions are available!
My life would be happier if I found very good PhD students to work with. If this is you, do apply!
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Contact:





Jiangshan Yu (于江山)

ARC DECRA Fellow
Lecturer (equiv. Assistant Professor in US)
Monash Blockchain Technology Centre
Faculty of Information Technology
Monash University, Australia.

I'm Associate Director (Research) at Monash Blockchain Technology Centre, a member of the Monash Cybersecurity Lab, and a Lecturer (~US Assistant Professor) in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Birmingham (UK), supervised by Prof. Mark Ryan (HP Inc. Chair in Cybersecurity). I did my postdoc with Prof. Paulo Esteves-Verissimo (IEEE and ACM Fellow) at SnT, University of Luxembourg.

My research interests are in the area of cybersecurity. In particular, the focus of my research has been on (designing and attacking) blockchain systems, user privacy, cryptographic key management, and ledger-based applications.

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  • [2021-01] Our paper "FPPW: A Fair and Privacy Preserving Watchtower For Bitcoin" is accepted for publication at FC'21.
  • [2021-01] Our paper "CollaEdge: A Decentralized Blockchain-based Platform for Cooperative Edge" is accepted for publication at WWW'21.
  • [2021-01] I'm delighted to serve as a PC member for FAB'21.
  • [2020-07] I'm delighted to serve as a PC member for ICDCS'21.
  • [2020-11] I'm delighted to be selected for a 2021 ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to support my research on blockchain for the next three years!
  • [2020-10] I'm delighted to be selected for a 2020 IBM Academic Award. This is covered by Monash News and Crypto News.
  • [2020-07] I'm delighted to serve as a PC member for ICBC'21.
  • [2020-06] I'm delighted to serve as a PC member for FC'21.
  • [2020-06] Our paper "How to Democratise and Protect AI: Fair and Differentially Private Decentralised Deep Learning" is accepted for publication at IEEE TDSC.
  • [2020-05] I'm delighted to serve as a PC member for DSN'21.
  • [2020-05] Our paper "Towards Fair and Privacy-Preserving Federated Deep Models" is accepted for publication at IEEE TPDS.
  • [2020-02] I'm delighted to serve as a PC member for AFT'20 and SRDS'20.
  • [2020-01] Two papers accepted at FC'20. Well done Tong Cao and Qin Wang!
  • [2019-11] I'm delighted to serve as a PC member for ICDCS'20.
  • [2019-08-22] I'm very proud to receive the Dean's Award for Excellence in Research Impact!
  • [2019-07] Our paper "On the optionality and fairness of Atomic Swaps" has been accepted by ACM Advances in Financial Technology (AFT).
  • [2019-06] Our paper on Privacy-Preserving Live Streaming has been accepted by SRDS'19.
  • [2019-04] I'd been nominated and selected as a finalist (Technology Application) for Endeavour Awards, which is Australia's Premier Awards Program within the manufacturing industry.
  • [2019-04] Our two papers on blockchain transaction untraceability have been accepted by CSF'19 and AsiaCCS'19.
  • [2019-03] RepuCoin has been covered by over 60 news media globally including our Monash News, Finder, 今 日头条(Toutiao), ZDNet, Sohu, BTC Wires, ScienceDaily, Ethereum World News, EurekAlert!, The US Breaking news, Homeland Security Today, etc.
  • [2019-01] Our paper "RepuCoin: Your Reputation is Your Power" has been accepted for publication by IEEE Transactions on Computers (IEEE TC).
  • [2018-12] Our paper "ANCHOR: logically-centralized security for Software-Defined Networks" has been accepted for publication by ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (ACM TOPS, previously known as ACM TISSEC.)
  • [2018-11] I'm delighted to be invited to attend the 75th Meeting of the IFIP WG 10.4 Working Group on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance.
  • [2018-11] A paper on "New Empirical Traceability Analysis of CryptoNote-Style Blockchains" has been accepted by Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2019 (FC19, 33/178=18.5%).
  • [2018-07] As co-chair, I'm delighted to see the 74th Meeting of the IFIP WG 10.4 on Blockchain has been very successful. All the material will be available at here.
  • [2018-05] CHARITY. Prof. Mark Ryan's Supporting for Aframano, a village in Ghana, Africa. See more detail at markryan.eu/aframano
    • [2017-10] Interviewed by Eldo Radio to explain end-to-end encryption in messaging and DECIM.
  • [2017-10] DECIM has been covered by dozens of international news media, such as Science Daily. The news was originally published by the University of Luxembourg (link) and the University of Birmingham (link).
  • [2017-06] A paper on "DECIM: Detecting Endpoint Compromise In Messaging" has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (IEEE TIFS), 2017.
  • [2017-05] A paper on "Authenticating compromisable storage systems" has been accepted by the 16th IEEE TrustCom, 2017.
  • [2017-04] I have been awarded for the ``Chinese Government Award for outstanding PhD scholar abroad''. The success rate is 3% in UK and 1% worldwide. Here is the news press.
  • [2017-04] A paper on "Automatically Detecting the Misuse of Secrets: Foundations, Design Principles, and Applications" has been accepted by the 30th IEEE CSF, 2017.


IMPACT





Selected research projects:

Our research on blockchain consensus, called RepuCoin, provides the first blockchain system that is able to tolerate 51% attacks. This system may save potentially millions of US dollars every month from the attacks, and increase the confidence of enterprise in adapting blockchains. (For example, from April 2018 to Feb 2019, at least ten successful 51% attacks are identified, with a total loss of over 28 million US dollars.) This work has been reported by over 60 news media globally including Monash News, Finder, 今日头条(Toutiao), ZDNet, Sohu, BTC Wires, ScienceDaily, Ethereum World News, EurekAlert!, The US Breaking news, Homeland Security Today, etc.

Our work on the ledger-based end-to-end secure messaging system, called DECIM, provides the first end-to-end secure messaging system that is able to detect the compromise of secret keys. This system has been further developed by a University of Birmingham spin-off as open source software, and have attracted funding support from Innovate UK. The system has attracted news media's attention as a breakthrough in messaging privacy, and has been featured in more than 40 international and national news media including Science Daily, Phys.org, ACM TechNews, EurekAlert, Futurism, and Silicon Republic. The news has been released in more than 7 languages by media from more than 10 countries including UK, US, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Turkey, Spain, and India. I have also been invited for an interview (to explain my innovation to general listeners) by Eldoradio --- a member of RTL group which is one of the world's leading producers of television content and the leading European entertainment network.

For blockchain system analysis, we identified vulnerabilities on the NEO blockchain ( FC'20') and CryptoNote-style blockchains (FC'20, CSF'19 , FC'19 , and AsiaCCS'19). For the NEO blockchain, we identified design flaws to break the consensus liveness and safety, which allows an attacker to spend the same coin multiple times. For CryptoNote-style blockchains, we traced 70%-91% transactions of supposed-to-be privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, including Monero, ByteCoin, and DigitalNote. We also provided optimal solutions within our formal model. Here are some news articles (News 1, News 2) reporting our works.

In 2019, there are over 250 decentralised exchanges with a total trading volume of over AU$3 billion. Most of them are based on the atomic swap protocol on Ethereum to enable cross-ledger communications. Our work (AFT'19') has identified an overlooked design flaw of the protocol. The flaw allows a trader to cheat others to gain extra profit. Our proposed fixes are included in the Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP-2266). Here is a news article covering this work.

I've co-designed a secure booting solution for Huawei Ltd, the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world, to manage their next generation network devices securely.



PUBLICATIONS


Selected Recent Publications:

    (An incomplete list of publications can be found at my Google scholar and DBLP page.)



My Team




Master students (minor thesis):

  1. Ran An (2019), "Analysis of stablecoins in blockchain", Monash University. (Co-supervised with Joseph Liu). (Now a PhD student at Monash University.)
  2. Xinyu Zhang (2019), "Revocable ring signature", Monash University. (Co-supervised with Joseph Liu). (Now a PhD student at Monash University.)
  3. Shaocong Yu (2019), "Traceability analysis of Monero using machine learning technology", Monash University. (Co-supervised with Joseph Liu and Lan Du).
  4. Pranav Kulkarni (2020), "Exploring energy-efficient RepuCoin", Monash University.
  5. Lianyang Yu (2020), "Game theoretic analysis on reputation concept in blockchain security", Monash University.
  6. Yu Xia (2020), "Formal analysis and verification of the RepuCoin system", Monash University. (Co-supervised with Vincent Rahli.)
PhD students:

  1. Tong Cao (Feb.2018-), University of Luxembourg. (Co-supervised with Prof. Paulo Verissimo)
  2. Runchao Han (Feb.2019-), Monash University.
  3. Arash Mirzaei (July.2019-), Monash University. (Co-supervised with Amin Sakzad)
  4. Joao Otavio Massari Chervinski (Oct.2019-), Monash University.
  5. Shange Fu (Oct.2019-), Monash University.
  6. Zhimei Sui (Nov.2019-), Monash University.
  7. Chaochen Shi (Jan.2020-), Deakin University. (Co-supervised with Prof. Yong Xiang)
  8. Sina Aeeneh (July.2020-), Monash University. (Faculty of Engineering, Co-supervised with Nikola Zlatanov)
Visitors:

I'm so fortunate to have the following colleagues visiting my team for collaboration:

  1. Paulo Verissimo (IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow), Professor and FNR PEARL Chair at University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg.
    (Nov.2019-Dec.2019)
  2. Evgenia Smirni (IEEE Fellow, ACM Distinguished Scientist) , Sidney P. Chockley Professor at College of William and Mary, US.
    (Jan.2020-March.2020)


GRANT & AWARDS



Grant, Awards, and scholarships:

  • Selected Recent Grant:
    • (Sole CI). A Scalable and Adaptive-Resilient Blockchain, AU$563,000 (AU$408,000 from ARC and AU$155,000 from Monash University), ARC DECRA, 2021-2023.
    • (Co-CI -- 34 CIs in total). Reliable Affordable Clean Energy for 2030, AU$349,000,000, the 21st round of the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) program. 07.2020-06.2031.
    • (Sole CI). Interoperability Across Distributed Ledgers, AU$57,397, gift research funding from IBM. 2020-2021.
    • (Sole CI). Design space and pitfalls: blockchain interoperability, AU$298,371, contract research. 2020-2021.
    • (Co-CI-- 3 CIs in total). A consensus mechanism for blockchain in the Internet of Things, AU$131,586 from Data61, 11.2019-11.2022.
    • (Co-CI -- 3 CIs in total). Next-generation blockchains: decentralised data structures suitable for IoT devices, AU$131,586 from Data61, 10.2019-10.2022.

  • Awards:
    • Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), Australian Research Council (ARC), 2021.
    • IBM Academic Award, 2020. (Covered by Monash News and Crypto News.)
    • Dean's Award for Excellence in Research Impact , Monash university, Australia, 2019.
    • Finalist (Technology Application) for Endeavour Awards, Premier Awards Program (Manufacturing Industry), Australia, 2019.
    • Chinese Government Award For Outstanding PhD Scholar Abroad, 2016. (3% in UK, 1% worldwide.)
    • Finalist for RAEng Enterprise Fellowship , Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng), UK. 2015.
    • First place award, the Coniston poster competition, University of Birmingham, UK, 2014.


Teaching




  1. FIT5214 Blockchain, Monash University, 2019. (Designer and Lecturer)
  2. FIT5214 Blockchain, Monash University, 2020. (Chief Examiner and Lecturer)


SERVICES



Service at Monash:


External Service:

  • Conference (Co-)Chair

  • Conference Program Committee Member
    • 2021
    • The 51st Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)
    • The 41st IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)
    • The 25th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC)
    • The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)
    • The 4th International Symposium on Foundations and Applications of Blockchain (FAB)
    2020
    • The 2nd ACM Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT)
    • The 40th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)
    • The 39th IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS)
    • The 2nd IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)
    • The 54th IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
    • The 19th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)
    • The 25th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy (ACISP)
    • The 15th International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS)
    2019
    • The 38th IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS)
    • The 15th International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology Inscrypt (Inscrypt)
    • The 20th International Conference on Cryptology in India (Indocrypt)
    • The 18th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)
    • The 13th International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS)
    2018
    • IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM)
    • DSN Workshop on Byzantine Consensus and Resilient Blockchains (BCRB)
    • The 52th IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
    2017
    • International Conference on Information Security Practice and Experience (ISPEC)
    2016
    • Software Architecture for Big Data and the Cloud, 2016.

  • Invited Reviewer (Selected Journal):
    • ACM Computing Surveys
    • IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials
    • ACM Transactions on Transactions on Privacy and Security (ACM TOPS)
    • IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security (IEEE TIFS)
    • IEEE Transactions on Computers (IEEE TC)
    • IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE TDSC)
    • IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT-J)
    • IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (IEEE TCC)
    • IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (IEEE TII)
    • IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (IEEE TETC)
    • The Computer Journal
    • PLOS ONE