Mitigating Censorship and MEV attacks

Blockchain miners have the power to censor and reorder transactions while creating blocks. This opens up an attack surface leading to Censorship and MEV problems. Our novel solution uses Timelock encryption to mitigate the problem.

Saksham Agrawal, Vinay J Ribeiro, Timelock Shield: A Robust Defense Against MEV and Censorship Attacks in Blockchain, Crypto Valley Conference 2025. (paper)

Cross-channel Payment Channel Networks

Interconnecting blockchains is an important problem. Can I pay in bitcoin and you receive the funds in Ether, with fast confirmation and low transaction fees? Our solution, Tombolo, does exactly that by connecting layer-2 payment channel networks (such as Lightning network and Raiden) of different blockchains together.

Siddharth Maurya, Nitin Awathare, Vinay Joseph Ribeiro and Umesh Bellur, Tombolo: Towards a Decentralized Interconnected Blockchain Ecosystem using Cross-Chain Payment Channels, ICDCS 2025. (paper)

Grief-Free and Bribery-Safe Atomic Swaps

Atomic swaps let two parties trustlessly exchange assets across different blockchains, but they are vulnerable to griefing, where one party abandons the exchange and locks up the other's funds until a timelock expires. Prior grief-free solutions need five or six on-chain transactions. Our protocol, 4-Swap, is the first to be both grief-free and bribery-safe while needing just four transactions, is fully Bitcoin-compatible, and requires no new opcodes.

Kirti Singh, Vinay J. Ribeiro, Susmita Mandal, 4-Swap: Achieving Grief-Free and Bribery-Safe Atomic Swaps Using Four Transactions, Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT) 2025. (paper)

Off-chain solution for scaling up smart contract computation

We have come up with a novel method to implement computationally intensive smart contracts on blockchains such as those of Ethereum, Bitcoin, Hyperledger etc.

Sourav Das, Vinay Joseph Ribeiro, Abhijeet Anand, YODA: Enabling computationally intensive contracts on blockchains with Byzantine and Selfish nodes, NDSS 2019 (paper). (Further work resulted in a paper at AISTATS 2022, paper.)

Speeding up Block validation in Blockchains

Our measurements of the Ethereum blocks and transactions show that miners can speed up block validation significantly using cached state.

Nitin Awathare, Sourav Das, Vinay J. Ribeiro, Umesh Bellur, RENOIR: Accelerating Blockchain Validation using State Caching, ICPE 2021. (paper)

Proactive rebalancing and reactive re-routing for Lightning Network

We present a method to improve transaction success ratio in payment channel networks such as Bitcoin's Lightning Network, by proactively rebalancing bidirectional channels and reactively rerouting payments around channels depleted of currency.

Nitin Awathare, Suraj, Akash, Vinay J. Ribeiro, Umesh Bellur, REBAL: Channel Balancing for Payment Channel Networks, MASCOTS 2021. (paper)

Regulating cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin

Aditya Ahuja, Vinay J. Ribeiro, Ranjan Pal, How Should We Regulate Cryptocurrencies via Consensus?: A Strategic Framework for Optimal Legal Transaction Throughput, ACM DLT 2022. (paper)

Reducing Confirmation time by 50% in Bitcoin-like blockchains

We introduce "Links" and "Anchors" which add PoW weight to blockchains more frequently than blocks. This helps reduce confirmation time by 50 percent.

Ovia Seshadri, Vinay J. Ribeiro, Aditya Kumar, Securely Boosting Chain Growth and Confirmation Speed in PoW Blockchains, IEEE Blockchain 2021. (paper) / Ovia Seshadri, Vinay J. Ribeiro, Shadab Zafar, Securely Improving Stability and Performance of PoW Blockchains Using Anchors, COMSNETS 2022. (paper)

Improving Ethereum computation by 100x without Sharding

We present a new method to improve maximum computation of smart contracts in Ethereum-like blockchains by up to 100x.

Sourav Das, Nitin Awathare, Ling Ren, Vinay J. Ribeiro, Umesh Bellur, Tuxedo: Maximizing Smart Contract computation in PoW Blockchains, SIGMETRICS 2022. (paper)

Decentralized Attestation for IoT Swarms

We have invented a decentralized attestation scheme for device swarms.

Samuel Wedaj, Kolin Paul, Vinay J. Ribeiro, DADS: Decentralised attestation of Device Swarms, ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, 2019. (paper)

RANSOMWARE Solution

My student, Saiyed Kashif Shaukat, developed a multi-layered solution, implemented for Microsoft Windows, for a dreaded type of malware called Ransomware. Ransomware encrypts a user's files and asks for a ransom in order to decrypt files. The solution, called RansomWall, uses machine learning in one of its layers.

Saiyed Kashif Shaukat, Vinay J. Ribeiro, RansomWall: A Layered Defense System against Cryptographic Ransomware Attacks using Machine Learning, COMSNETS 2018. (paper)

How to choose Data and Feature sets well for IoT malware detection using ML

Misha Mehra, Jay N. Paranjape, Vinay J. Ribeiro, Improving ML Detection of IoT Botnets using Comprehensive Data and Feature Sets, COMSNETS 2021. (paper)

Frugal Deep Learning analysis of network traffic

BOND is designed considering the constraints of IoT gateways and betters the F1 score of standard benchmark ML algorithms and State-of-The-Art method Kitsune, by at least 10 percent.

Himanshu Gandhi, Misha Mehra, Vinay J. Ribeiro, BOND: Efficient and Frugal DL Model Co-design for Botnet detection on IoT Gateways, AIML Systems 2021. (paper)