All News
Our lab welcomes Ilias as the very first PhD student! Before working with us, Ilias earned his Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Democritus University of Thrace and worked as a software engineer at CERN. His research will be at the intersection of network security and applied machine learning. Welcome!
We are now looking for strongly motivated candidates to join our lab as a postdoc! This postdoc is expected to work specifically on securing the network infrastructures of AI training. That said, no extensive networking or security background is required! The position is a temporary full-time employment for two years with the possibility of a one-year extension. The application deadline is 31 October, 2025.
We just published a new blog article on the PhD recruitment process in our lab. If you’ve seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), you might agree that the infamous Bridge of Death scene bears an uncanny resemblance to the PhD application journey. Give it a read — and if you’re planning to cross our metaphorical bridge, may the tips inside help you avoid the academic abyss (and know your favorite color with confidence).
Due to some unexpected changes in our previous recruitment, we are pleased to announce new openings for PhD positions in Network Security for AI. Selected candidates must be able to start no later than early 2026. The application deadline is 30 September 2025.
Here is the the link to the application portal.
For more information about our lab, refer to our open letter to prospective PhD students.
We are glad to share that our lab has available position for one PhD student starting 2026.
The PhD position is expected to work specifically on blockchain security and start by March 2026.
The link to the application portal is here. The application deadline is 30 September, 2025.
Together with our collaborators at NTU (Taiwan) and ETH Zurich (Switzerland), we just published
a paper on finding function and storage collisions in proxy smart contracts at IEEE ICDCS 2025!
We present Proxion, an automated cross-contract analyzer that identifies all proxy smart contracts in Ethereum, including the hidden ones that lack both source code and past transactions. This allows us to identify millions more proxy contracts and thousands of unreported collisions, compared to previous works.
See you soon too, Glasgow!
We are thrilled to share that we just secured a funding from WASP Academic Doctoral Student Projects! Thanks to this, we will have another opening position for PhD student. This position will start in late 2025, and will focus on combining network security and AI training.
As part of our blog, we just published an open letter to those considering joining our lab as PhD students.
This letter, in the form of a marriage proposal, describes our lab culture, our expectations, and the next steps.
(Committing to a PhD is surprisingly similar to committing to a marriage!)
We welcome Adrià Torralba-Agell as the first student in the lab.
Adrià is a final-year Ph.D. student from UOC under the supervision of Cristina Pérez-Solà.
Adrià joins us on a three-month research exchange, focusing on network security issues of ZK-Rollups.
Welcome!
We’re excited to announce that Secura Lab now has a blog!
Our first article explores mental health in academia, featuring insights from a year of self-tracking.
Check it out and stay tuned for more updates and reflections from our lab!
We are looking for enthusiastic candidates to join our newly launched lab as PhD students! These positions tentatively focus on network security problems in blockchains and AI/ML systems. That said, the research topics are quite flexible and so is the starting date. Note that the application deadline is 31 March, 2025.
All necessary information can be found in this link. We recommend a thorough read.
Please reach out to Muoi Tran if you have any further questions.
A new paper on fuzzing Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake blockchain implementations has been accepted at IEEE/ACM ICSE 2025! This is a joint work with our collaborators from KAIST (Korea) and NUS (Singapore).
Blockchain systems run on top of P2P networks of nodes who collectively adhere to consensus algorithms. What may go wrong if nodes use different clients (or different versions of the same client)? Unsafe consensus! Tailored to detect discrepancies in how blockchain clients handle the complex fork resolutions, our fuzzing tool Forky found several unreported bugs in the most two popular blockchains, namely Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Muoi Tran has been acknowledged as one of the top reviewers at ACM CCS ‘24. Thanks the program chairs! This honor is a testament to our lasting commitment to contributing high-quality reviews to the community.
Muoi will again serve on the technical program committee, and also, on the organizing committee as a Poster/Demo chair at ACM CCS ‘25’ in Taipei (Taiwan).
Along with Muoi Tran accepting the offer to join Chalmers University of Technology, we have a new lab.
Secura means secure in Latin. It is what we do – securing (networked) systems from lower layers and up!
Credit: Many thanks to NSG@ETH for letting us borrow their web design.
Our paper on routing attacks against cryptocurrency mining pools has been accepted at IEEE S&P 2024.
We propose the Erosion attacks, in which network adversaries disrupt Proof-of-Work mining pools at scale. Check our paper to see how 96% of Bitcoin mining power can be disrupted by tampering with a few packets!
