Economics & Security 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. Do get in touch if you want to collaborate or chat!

News.

Aug 21, '26
We are hiring students at all levels and are also open to interns.
Aug 20, '26
The Economics & Security Lab website is live.

Members.

Aviv Yaish

Illustration of the BURDELL server — BURDELL

Server

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Affiliates.

Ignacy (Iggy) Nieweglowski

Staples High School

Papers.

[C15]
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)
[C14]
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)
[C13]
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)
[C12]
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)
[J3]
Platform Building With Fake Consumers: On Double Dippers and Airdrop Farmers
Authors: Hanna Hałaburda, Ben Livshits, Aviv Yaish
In: Management Science, minor revision (2026)
[J2]
Transaction Fee Mechanisms Robust to Welfare-Increasing Collusion
Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish
In: Games and Economic Behavior (2026)
[J1]
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)
[I12]
FISSION: Label Augmentation for Bot Detection
Authors: Sen Yang, Ignacy Nieweglowski, Aviv Yaish
In: ResearchGate (2026)
[I11]
Freemium Is All You Need
Authors: Maxim Bichuch, Aviv Yaish
In: arXiv (2026)
[I10]
Order Auctions with Private Position Preferences
Authors: Ruijie Wang, Aviv Yaish
In: arXiv (2026)
[I9]
Authenticated Data Structures for Dynamic Workloads
Authors: Ziheng (Tom) Shangguan, Aviv Yaish, Dahlia Malkhi
In: ResearchGate (2026)
[I8]
Modern Portfolio Theory in the Crypto-Wilderness
Authors: Ivan Vynyavskyy, Stefan Kitzler, Bernhard Haslhofer, Aviv Yaish
In: arXiv (2026)
[I7]
Your Loss is My Gain: Low Stake Attacks on Liquid Staking Pools
Authors: Sen Yang, Aviv Yaish, Arthur Gervais, Fan Zhang
In: arXiv (2026)
[C11]
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)
[I6]
PoliFi Tokens and the Trump Effect
Authors: Ignacy Nieweglowski, Aviv Yaish, Fahad Saleh, Fan Zhang
In: arXiv (2025)
[I5]
Quantifying Inequality in Blockchain Networks
Authors: Nir Chemaya, Aviv Yaish, Shahar Yacouel, Dahlia Malkhi, Lin William Cong
In: SSRN (2025)
[I4]
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)
[C10]
Barriers to Collusion-resistant Transaction Fee Mechanisms
Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish
In: Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (2024)
[C9]
Discrete & Bayesian Transaction Fee Mechanisms
Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish
In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Mathematical Research for Blockchain Economy (2024)
[C8]
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
[C7]
Incentives in the Ether: Practical Cryptocurrency Economics & Security
Authors: Aviv Yaish
In: Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference (2024)
[C6]
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
[I3]
Strategic Vote Timing in Elections With Public Tallies
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Svetlana Abramova, Rainer Böhme
In: arXiv (2024)
[I2]
Scheduling With Time Discounts
Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish
In: arXiv (2024)
[C5]
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)
[C4]
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
[C3]
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)
[I1]
Airdrops: Giving Money Away is Harder than it Seems
Authors: Johnnatan Messias, Aviv Yaish, Benjamin Livshits
In: arXiv (2023)
[C2]
Correct Cryptocurrency ASIC Pricing: Are Miners Overpaying?
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Aviv Zohar
In: Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (2023)
[C1]
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