Dr. Muoi Tran
Post-doc
My full name is Tran Duc Muoi.
I am a postdoctoral researcher in the NSG group (D-ITET, ETH Zurich) led by prof. Laurent Vanbever. My research topics of interest include network and blockchain security. I am fascinated by novel attacks that break large systems and how to counter them, toward an overall goal of building a more secure Internet.
I obtained my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from National University of Singapore in 2022 under the guidance of prof. Zhenkai Liang and prof. Min Suk Kang. My Ph.D. thesis is "Handling network attacks exploiting routing information asymmetries". Prior to my Ph.D., I earned my B.S. degree from Vietnam National University in 2015.
To find more about my research, check out my CV.
Recent Publications
On the Sustainability of Bitcoin Partitioning Attacks
Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2023. Bol, Brac, Croatia (May 2023)
A series of recent studies have shown that permissionless blockchain peer-to-peer networks can be partitioned at low cost (e.g., only a few thousand bots are needed), stealthily (e.g., no control plane detection is available), or at scale (e.g., the entire bitcoin network can be divided into two). In this paper, we focus on the sustainability of partitioning attacks in Bitcoin, which is barely discussed in the literature. Existing studies investigate new partitioning attack strategies extensively but not how long the partition they create lasts. Our findings show that, fortunately for Bitcoin, the permissionless peer-to-peer network can be partitioned but only for a short time. In particular, two recent partitioning attacks (i.e., Erebus, SyncAttack) do not maintain partitions for more than 10 minutes in most cases. After analyzing Bitcoin's peer eviction mechanism (which makes the two original attacks difficult to sustain), we propose optimization strategies for the two attacks and calculate the total cost of the optimized attacks for a 1-hour attack duration. Our results complement the original attack studies: (i) the optimized Erebus attack shows that it requires at least one adversary-controlled Bitcoin node close to a target and a few additional expensive attack steps for sustainable attacks, and (ii) the optimized SyncAttack can create sustainable partitions only with excessive cost.
