Kaihua Qin

I’m a Ph.D. student at Imperial College London, supervised by Dr. Arthur Gervais. My research interests span blockchains and system security with a recent focus on decentralized finance (DeFi). DeFi is one of the most promising applications of blockchains. I’m motivated to understand the risks and vulnerabilities of the DeFi ecosystem. Many of the DeFi security issues are caused by the inherent properties of blockchains and flawed protocol designs. In my research, I’m trying to improve the security of DeFi from both the underlying blockchain and the high-level DeFi protocol perspective.
Interests. Blockchain, Decentralized Finance (DeFi), System Security

Publications

[Google Scholar]

• Quantifying Blockchain Extractable Value: How dark is the forest? [arxiv] Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Arthur Gervais to appear at the 43rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P 2022)
• Speculative Multipliers on DeFi: Quantifying On-Chain Leverage Risks [arxiv] Zhipeng Wang, Kaihua Qin, Duc Vu Minh, Arthur Gervais to appear at the Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2022 (FC 22)

• An Empirical Study of DeFi Liquidations: Incentives, Risks, and Instabilities [arxiv] Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Pablo Gamito, Philipp Jovanovic, Arthur Gervais in proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2021 (IMC 2021)
• CeFi vs. DeFi —- Comparing Centralized to Decentralized Finance [arxiv] Kaihua Qin *, Liyi Zhou *, Yaroslav Afonin, Ludovico Lazzaretti, Arthur Gervais in proceedings of the 2021 Crypto Valley Conference on Blockchain Technology (CVCBT 2021) * equal contributions
• On the Just-In-Time Discovery of Profit-Generating Transactions in DeFi Protocols [arxiv] Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Benjamin Livshits, Arthur Gervais in proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P 2021)
• High-Frequency Trading on Decentralized On-Chain Exchanges [arxiv] Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Christof Ferreira Torres, Duc V Le, Arthur Gervais in proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P 2021)
• Attacking the DeFi Ecosystem with Flash Loans for Fun and Profit [arxiv] [blog] Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Benjamin Livshits, Arthur Gervais in proceedings of the Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2021 (FC 21)

• FileBounty: Fair Data Exchange [arxiv] Simon Janin *, Kaihua Qin *, Akaki Mamageishvili, Arthur Gervais in proceedings of the 2020 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (IEEE S&B 2020) * equal contributions

• Applying Private Information Retrieval to Lightweight Bitcoin Clients [arxiv] Kaihua Qin, Henryk Hadass, Arthur Gervais, Joel Reardon in proceedings of the 2019 Crypto Valley Conference on Blockchain Technology (CVCBT 2019)

• An Overview of Blockchain Scalability, Interoperability and Sustainability Kaihua Qin, Arthur Gervais EU Blockchain Observatory & Forum

• On How Zero-Knowledge Proof Blockchain Mixers Improve, and Worsen User Privacy [arxiv] Zhipeng Wang, Stefanos Chaliasos, Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Lifeng Gao, Pascal Berrang, Ben Livshits, Arthur Gervais.
• A2MM: Mitigating Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges [arxiv] Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Arthur Gervais

Projects

• Blockchain Workbench (https://blockchainworkbench.com/) Blockchain Workbench is a blockchain online learning platform.It aims to provide basic knowledge of blockchains and interactive solidity programming exercises to beginners.It has been used as the solidity educational platform for the blockchain courses at Imperial College London and HSLU.