Publications
Papers coauthored with Amir Goharshady follow the theoretical computer science convention of alphabetical author order.
Browse 11 papers by year, venue, and tag.
ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security · 2026
To appear.
Rogue develops updatable matrix lookup arguments and studies how they can be used to support verifiable database applications, with an emphasis on proof-system expressiveness and efficient update handling.
IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures · 2026
Under review at IEEE DAPPS 2026.
Irreversible transaction fees create a persistent revenue flow from users to validators, fueling MEV extraction, specialized builder markets, and the economies of scale that progressively centralize block production. We study LockFee, a principal-preserving admission primitive in which each accepted transaction locks collateral for a fixed duration and recovers the principal in full afterward; users bear only the opportunity cost of locked capital. Under a simplified equal-size-transaction model, we prove that sustaining full admission at throughput q with lock amount L and lock duration D requires aggregate locked capital of order qLD. A baseline protocol pairs this admission rule with inflation-funded validator rewards, achieving validator participation and self-spam resistance without any irreversible fee flowing from users to validators, thereby reducing centralization pressure. As a downstream effect, LockFee screens users by heterogeneous opportunity cost of capital rather than by a uniform irreversible payment.
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 2025
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
This paper gives two trustless smart-contract protocols for sampling correlated equilibria on blockchain, replacing the traditional trusted mediator with cryptographic techniques based on oblivious transfer and zkSNARKs.
IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive · 2025
IACR ePrint 2025/1428.
This manuscript studies strategic mining in proof-of-stake systems when random beacon output is fixed across multiple future slots within an epoch. It formalizes the lookahead effect created by practical random election and gives an efficient optimal attack algorithm showing profitable deviations at much lower stake fractions than earlier per-slot-randomness models.
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency · 2024
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
SRNG presents an efficient decentralized approach to secret random number generation, aiming to provide tamper-resistant randomness while preserving the privacy properties needed by higher-level blockchain protocols.
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency · 2024
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
This paper develops decentralized random beacon protocols with explicit attention to gas efficiency, aiming to keep randomness services practical for on-chain use without weakening decentralization goals.
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
This paper presents Asparagus, a method for automatically synthesizing parametric gas upper bounds for smart contracts so that developers can reason about cost behavior before deployment.
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
This paper studies distributed randomness generation under strategic behavior and proposes a trustless, bias-resistant approach that aligns game-theoretic incentives with randomness quality.
Workshop on Mathematical Research for Blockchain Economy · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
This work studies randomness generation for proof-of-stake settings through a game-theoretic lens, focusing on protocol incentives and how strategic behavior shapes the quality of the randomness mechanism.
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
PureLottery studies fair leader election without relying on a decentralized random number generation service, showing how protocol design can still achieve fairness guarantees in blockchain settings.
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · 2021
* Equal contribution.
This paper studies visual question answering over pathology images and explores how multimodal models can answer medically grounded questions in a scientific imaging domain rather than a natural-image setting.