Publications
Papers coauthored with Amir Goharshady follow the theoretical computer science convention of alphabetical author order.
Browse 13 papers by year, venue, and tag.
ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing · 2026
This paper presents a new relaxation of transaction order fairness concept, by requiring pairwise precedence only if the two transactions are received significantly apart in time. We also characterize its feasible parameters.
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
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
We present 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.
IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures · 2026
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
We present Proof-of-Election, a new blockchain consensus protocol that mimics real-world democratic elections, to vote based on block contents rather than blindly trust proposers, and only admit the highest voted block in each slot.
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.
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.
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.
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
This paper presents Asparagus, an automated tool for synthesizing parametric static gas upper bounds for smart contracts. The main technical contribution is to employ sound quantifier elimination techniques based on Farkas' lemma and other algebro-geometric methods.
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
In randomness generation smart contracts, participants are assumed but have no incentive to submit random integers rather than sending arbitrary values. This paper presents a novel matrix game to enforce uniformity of batched value generation by collision-resistant Nash equilibria.
Workshop on Mathematical Research for Blockchain Economy · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
PoS requires decentralized randomness. Existing randomness generation protocols either rely on pseudo-randomness, or assume that a majority of the participants are honest in submitting their randdomness share and follow the rest of the protocol. However, these participants have no incentive to contribute true random shares compared to contributing an arbitrary share in the first place. This paper presents a game-theoretic design for incentivizing participants submitting true random shares, without relying on pseudo-randomness.
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, but instead leveraging a tournament among interested participants.
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.