Yann Vonlanthen

yvonlanthen@ethz.ch

I am in my fourth and final year as a Ph.D. student at the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich, where I am advised by Prof. Roger Wattenhofer. My research interests span the theoretical and practical aspects of blockchains, distributed systems, and digital democracy.

More specifically, I aim to design and build fast and scalable decentralized systems — for instance by introducing fast paths, and enabling parallelization across all protocol levels.

I also enjoy exploring the security of existing systems, including network security, consensus mechanisms, and application-level security (DAOs, VAAs, etc.).

Lastly, I believe in the potential of proof-of-personhood and extending one-person-one-vote into the digital realm. By redesigning decentralized systems with built-in Sybil resistance, we can empower communities with potentially far-reaching economic and societal impacts.

In my free time, I enjoy gardening and participating in a variety of sports.

news

Dec 6, 2024	I presented our paper “Banyan: Fast Rotating Leader BFT” at Middleware’24. Thrilled to announce that it received the Best Paper Award.
Oct 5, 2024	I will be serving as a PC member for FC’25.
Sep 13, 2024	I presented our most recent work titled “Deanonymizing Ethereum Validators: The P2P Network Has a Privacy Issue” at the TUM Blockchain Conference.
Jul 5, 2024	I will be presenting our paper “SoK: Attacks on DAOs” at DAWO and AFT’24.
Dec 10, 2023	Our paper “Short Paper: Dissecting the EIP-2930 Optional Access Lists” was accepted at FC’24.

selected publications

arXiv
Deanonymizing Ethereum Validators: The P2P Network Has a Privacy Issue

Lioba Heimbach, Yann Vonlanthen, Juan Villacis, and 2 more authors

pre-print

Awarded a bug bounty by the Ethereum Foundation.

Abs arXiv Bib

Many blockchain networks aim to preserve the anonymity of validators in the peer-to-peer (P2P) network, ensuring that no adversary can link a validator’s identifier to the IP address of a peer due to associated privacy and security concerns. This work demonstrates that the Ethereum P2P network does not offer this anonymity. We present a methodology that enables any node in the network to identify validators hosted on connected peers and empirically verify the feasibility of our proposed method. Using data collected from four nodes over three days, we locate more than 15% of Ethereum validators in the P2P network. The insights gained from our deanonymization technique provide valuable information on the distribution of validators across peers, their geographic locations, and hosting organizations. We further discuss the implications and risks associated with the lack of anonymity in the P2P network and propose methods to help validators protect their privacy. The Ethereum Foundation has awarded us a bug bounty, acknowledging the impact of our results.
@misc{heimbach2024deanonymizing, title = {Deanonymizing Ethereum Validators: The P2P Network Has a Privacy Issue}, author = {Heimbach, Lioba and Vonlanthen, Yann and Villacis, Juan and Kiffer, Lucianna and Wattenhofer, Roger}, journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.04366}, year = {pre-print}, eprint = {2409.04366}, archiveprefix = {arXiv}, primaryclass = {cs.CR}, }

Middleware 24

Banyan: Fast Rotating Leader BFT

Yann Vonlanthen, Jakub Sliwinski, Massimo Albarello, and 1 more author

In 25th ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (Middleware), Hong Kong, China, 2024

🏆 Best Paper Award

Abs arXiv Bib Slides

@inproceedings{vonlanthen2024banyan,
  author = {Vonlanthen, Yann and Sliwinski, Jakub and Albarello, Massimo and Wattenhofer, Roger},
  title = {{Banyan: Fast Rotating Leader BFT}},
  booktitle = {25th ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (Middleware), Hong Kong, China},
  year = {2024},
}

AFT 24
SoK: Attacks on DAOs

Rainer Feichtinger, Robin Fritsch, Lioba Heimbach, and 2 more authors

In 6th International Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT), Vienna, Austria, 2024

Non-archival: 4th Workshop on Decentralized Finance (DeFi), March 2024
Non-archival: The Latest in DeFi Research (TLDR) Conference, May 2024
Non-archival: European DAO Workshop (DAWO) 2024, July 2024

Abs arXiv Bib

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are blockchain-based organizations that facilitate decentralized governance. Today, DAOs not only hold billions of dollars in their treasury but also govern many of the most popular Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols. This paper systematically analyses security threats to DAOs, focusing on the types of attacks they face. We study attacks on DAOs that took place in the past, attacks that have been theorized to be possible, and potential attacks that were uncovered and prevented in audits. For each of these (potential) attacks, we describe and categorize the attack vectors utilized into four categories. This reveals that while many attacks on DAOs take advantage of the less tangible and more complex human nature involved in governance, audits tend to focus on code and protocol vulnerabilities. Thus, additionally, the paper examines empirical data on DAO vulnerabilities, outlines risk factors contributing to these attacks, and suggests mitigation strategies to safeguard against such vulnerabilities.
@inproceedings{feichtinger2024sok, title = {SoK: Attacks on DAOs}, author = {Feichtinger, Rainer and Fritsch, Robin and Heimbach, Lioba and Vonlanthen, Yann and Wattenhofer, Roger}, booktitle = {6th International Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT), Vienna, Austria}, year = {2024}, }