Yuan Lu

Yuan Lu

Working on blockchain, cryptography, and DApps.

Hi, welcome to the homepage of Yuan Lu, Ph.D. (simplified Chinese 路远 or traditional Chinese 路遠, which literally means a long way to go).

Research Interests

My research spans blockchain infrastructure, decentralized applications, and the design and analysis of multi-party cryptographic protocols for Web3. I am particularly interested in developing efficient and secure foundations for trustworthy networked systems, with particular emphasis on robustness, economic fairness, privacy protection, and censorship resilience. Ultimately, my work seeks to support the development of citizen-first decentralized infrastructure and user-centric Web3 applications that operate reliably in adversarial and unstable real-world environments. Representative research topics include:

  • Blockchain Consensus. Enhancing the scalability, robustness, and performance of Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus to secure Layer-1 blockchain infrastructure deployed over the unstable real-world Internet (CCS 25/22a/22b, NDSS 25/22, USENIX Security 26, PODC 20, TDSC 25a/23/22, TIFS 25a/24).

  • Secure Multi-Party Computation. Integrating fault-tolerant techniques into scalable MPC, anonymous communication, and federated learning, enabling more robust and scalable deployments of such distributed systems over the open and fluctuating Internet (USENIX Security 25a/25b).

  • Threshold Cryptographic Protocols. Enhancing the efficiency of bootstrapping and reconfiguration for threshold cryptosystems and modern Byzantine fault-tolerant systems, and extending their applications toward more trustworthy key management and authentication systems (IEEE SP 26, ICDCS 22, TDSC 25b, TIFS 25b).

  • Decentralized Applications. Designing practical, privacy-preserving, and economically rational decentralized applications for peer-to-peer settings over blockchains, including fully decentralized fair exchanges between cryptocurrency and personal data as well as other computing resources or fiat currency (ICDCS 20/18, TPDS 22, ESORICS 21/20, CVC 25—Best Paper Award).

Selected Publications

Many of my research results have been published in top-tier computer science venues (according to CORE ranking, CS rankings, CCF ranking). Examples include publications in ACM PODC, ACM CCS, IEEE S&P (Oakland), USENIX Security, and NDSS:

  • [Oakland’26] Practical Asynchronous Distributed Key Reconfiguration and Its Applications. with Hanwen Feng, Yingzi Gao, Qiang Tang, Jing Xu.

  • [Security’26] Logos: Robust Sharding Blockchain With Fast Processing and Optimal Cross-Shard Overhead. with Yizhong Liu, Boyu Zhao, Yuxuan Hu, et al.

  • [CCS’25] Realizing Corrupted-Shard Tolerance: A Sharding Blockchain with Preserving Global Resilience. with Yizhong Liu, Andi Liu, Zhuocheng Pan, et al.

  • [Security’25] Aion: Robust and Efficient Multi-Round Single-Mask Secure Aggregation Against Malicious Participants. with Yizhong Liu, Zixiao Jia, Zian Jin, et al.

  • [Security’25] Dumbo-MPC: Efficient Asynchronous MPC with Optimal Resilience. with Yuan Su, Jiliang Li, Chengyi Dong, Yuyi Wang, Qiang Tang.

  • [NDSS’25] Kronos: A Secure and Generic Sharding Blockchain Consensus with Optimized Overhead. with Yizhong Liu, Andi Liu, Zhuocheng Pan, et al.

  • [CCS’22] Dumbo-NG: Fast Asynchronous BFT Consensus with Throughput-Oblivious Latency. with Yingzi Gao, Zhenliang Lu, Qiang Tang, Jing Xu, Zhenfeng Zhang.

  • [CCS’22] Bolt-Dumbo Transformer: Asynchronous Consensus As Fast As the Pipelined BFT. with Zhenliang Lu, Qiang Tang.

  • [NDSS’22] Speeding Dumbo: Pushing Asynchronous BFT Closer to Practice. with Bingyong Guo, Zhenliang Lu, Qiang Tang, Jing Xu, Zhenfeng Zhang.

  • [PODC’20] Dumbo-MVBA: Optimal Multi-Valued Validated Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement, Revisited. with Zhenliang Lu, Qiang Tang, Guiling Wang.

Professional Activities

  • PC for Conferences: CCS 26/25/24, FC 26/25, PST 20, APKC 21, etc.

  • Chairing: AI+blockchain track of IEEE ICDLT 25, Phd forum of SecureComm 26.

  • Referee for Journals: Distributed Computing, IEEE TIFS, IEEE TDSC, IEEE/ACM ToN, IEEE TMC, IEEE TVT, ACM Computing Surveys, IET Information Security, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, etc.

  • Referee for Conferences: ACM PODC 24/23/21, USENIX Security 21, ASIACRYPT 21-18, INFOCOM 20-17, ESORICS 20/19/17, AsiaCCS 20, ACNS 19, PKC 22/19, TrustCom 19, ACISP 18, IEEE Blockchain 18, ICICS 18, ICBC 18, etc.

Research Fundings

  • Asynchronous Byzantine-Fault Tolerant Protocols for Blockchain. NSFC, PI, 2021-2023

  • Design and Analysis of Blockchain Consensus for Complicated Networks. MOST, PI, 2023-2025

Awards and Honors

  • Promising Paper Award. Crypto Valley Conference 2025

  • Joseph Leung Award for Best PhD Thesis. NJIT

  • Award for Outstanding Graduate. Nankai University

  • Award for Best Master’s Thesis. Nankai University

Medium Coverage