Ari Juels

About

Ari Juels is the Weill Family Foundation and Joan and Sanford I. Weill Professor of computer science at Cornell Tech, the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, and the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute. He is co-director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3) and the chief scientist at Chainlink Labs. Juels's recent areas of interest include blockchains, cryptocurrency, and smart contracts, as well as applied cryptography, user authentication, and privacy. He has a distinguished background, having served as the chief scientist of RSA, director of RSA Laboratories, and a distinguished engineer at EMC (now Dell EMC), where he worked until 2013. Juels holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been featured as an expert source in various news publications such as Coindesk, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes, and Popular Science.

Research topics

• Computer Security
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer network
• Distributed computing
• Finance
• Business
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Theoretical computer science

Selected publications

• Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning in Decentralized Exchanges, Miner Extractable Value, and Consensus Instability

  2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) · 2020 · 426 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Blockchains, and specifically smart contracts, have promised to create fair and transparent trading ecosystems.Unfortunately, we show that this promise has not been met. We document and quantify the widespread and rising deployment of arbitrage bots in blockchain systems, specifically in decentralized exchanges (or "DEXes"). Like high-frequency traders on Wall Street, these bots exploit inefficiencies in DEXes, paying high transaction fees and optimizing network latency to frontrun, i.e., antici…

  DOI

• Order-Fairness for Byzantine Consensus

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2020 · 137 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• DECO: Liberating Web Data Using Decentralized Oracles for TLS

  2020-10-30 · 112 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Thanks to the widespread deployment of TLS, users can access private data over channels with end-to-end confidentiality and integrity. What they cannot do, however, is prove to third parties the provenance of such data, i.e., that it genuinely came from a particular website. Existing approaches either introduce undesirable trust assumptions or require server-side modifications. Users' private data is thus locked up at its point of origin. Users cannot export data in an integrity-protected way to…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Themis: Fast, Strong Order-Fairness in Byzantine Consensus

  2023-11-15 · 53 citations

  articleOpen access

  We introduce Themis, a scheme for introducing fair ordering of transactions into (permissioned) Byzantine consensus protocols with at most ƒ faulty nodes among n ≥ 4ƒ + 1. Themis enforces the strongest notion of fair ordering proposed to date. It also achieves standard liveness, rather than the weaker notion of previous work with the same fair ordering property.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Clockwork Finance: Automated Analysis of Economic Security in Smart Contracts

  2023-05-01 · 38 citations

  articleSenior author

  We introduce the Clockwork Finance Framework (CFF), a general purpose, formal verification framework for mechanized reasoning about the economic security properties of composed decentralized-finance (DeFi) smart contracts.CFF features three key properties. It is contract complete, meaning that it can model any smart contract platform and all its contracts—Turing complete or otherwise. It does so with asymptotically constant model overhead. It is also attack-exhaustive by construction, meaning th…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• TTP: Medium: Democratizing Secure Password Management

  NSF · $1.2M · 2016–2020

• TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Distribution-Sensitive Cryptography

  NSF · $800k · 2015–2019

• NSF-BSF: SaTC: CORE: Small: Blockchain Fairness

  NSF · $500k · 2019–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Florian Tramèr

  39 shared

• Yan Ji

  Cornell University

  26 shared

• Fan Zhang

  Yale University

  26 shared

• Thomas Ristenpart

  Cornell University

  24 shared

• Philip Daian

  Cornell University

  23 shared

• Giulia Fanti

  22 shared

• Andrew H. Miller

  Emory University

  19 shared

• Terry Benzel

  Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

  18 shared

Similar researchers at Cornell University

• Jon Kleinbergh-122
• Deborah Estrinh-120
• Wen Sunh-102