Sarah Azouvi | Protocol Labs Research

Sarah Azouvi

Research Scientist/ ConsensusLab

Education

PhD in Computer Science, 2021
University College London

Sarah is a research scientist with interests that lie at the intersection of Applied Cryptography, Distributed Systems, and Game Theory. During her PhD, she mostly worked on decentralized consensus protocols but also looked at other aspects of decentralized systems such as their governance.

Areas of Expertise

Talks

2022-11-21

dOnlyFans
ConsensusLab Summit / 2022.10.27 / Lisbon, Portugal

2022-11-21

Unexpected consensus? The possible futures of the Filecoin network
ConsensusLab Summit / 2022.10.27 / Lisbon, Portugal

2022-03-11

Bitcoin checkpointing project update
ConsensusLab 22Q2 Team Week / 2022.02.07 / Dubai, UAE

2021-12-14

Securing membership and state checkpoints of BFT and PoS blockchains by anchoring onto the Bitcoin blockchain
ConsensusDays 21 / 2021.10.08

2021-09-07

Private attacks in longest chain PoS protocols with single secret leader election
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2021.09.07

2021-05-03

SoK: Tools for game theoretic models of security for cryptocurrencies
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2021.05.03

2021-02-09

Winkle: a decentralized checkpointing for proof-of-stake systems
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2021.02.09

Publications

2023-08-14/Conference paper

Security analysis of Filecoin's Expected Consensus in the Byzantine vs honest model
Filecoin is the largest storage-based open-source blockchain, both by storage capacity (>11EiB) and market capitalization. This paper provides the first formal security analysis of Filecoin’s consensus (ordering) protocol, Expected Consensus (EC).

2023-04-22/Conference paper

Base fee manipulation in Ethereum's EIP-1559 transaction fee mechanism
In 2021 Ethereum adjusted the transaction pricing mechanism by implementing EIP-1559, which introduces the base fee - a fixed network fee per block that is burned and adjusted dynamically in accordance with network demand.

2022-12-13/Conference paper

Pikachu: Securing PoS blockchains from long-range attacks by checkpointing into Bitcoin PoW using Taproot
Blockchain systems based on a reusable resource, such as proof-of-stake (PoS), provide weaker security guarantees than those based on proof-of-work.

2022-01-26/Conference paper

Decentralisation conscious players and system reliability
We propose a game-theoretic model of the reliability of decentralized systems based on Varian’s model of system reliability.

2021-11-16/Conference paper

Private attacks in longest chain proof-of-stake protocols with single secret leader elections
Single Secret Leader Elections have been proposed as an improved leader election mechanism for proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains.

2020-10-21/Conference paper

Winkle: foiling long-range attacks in proof-of-stake systems
Winkle protects any validator-based byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanisms against long-range attacks.

2020-03-03/Conference paper

SoK: Tools for game theoretic models of security for cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrencies have garnered much attention in recent years, both from the academic community and industry.