lkiffer@ccs.neu.edu                                                                                                        luciannakiffer.com

EDUCATION

Ph.D. , Computer Science                                                    July 2016 - Present

Khoury College of Computer Science

Northeastern University, Boston, MA

Area of focus: Blockchain Systems

Advisors: Alan Mislove and Rajmohan Rajaraman

Bachelor of Science, Mathematics                        August 2012 - May 2016

Tulane University, New Orleans, LA

Coordinate Major: Computer Science,  Institutional Honors: Cum Laude

PUBLICATIONS

Under the Hood of the Ethereum Gossip Protocol

Lucianna Kiffer, Asad Salman, Dave Levin, Alan Mislove and Cristina Nita-Rotaru

In Proceedings of the Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC'21),

March 2021

HaPPY-mine: Designing a Mining Reward Function

Lucianna Kiffer and Rajmohan Rajaraman

In Proceedings of the Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC'21),

March 2021

FlyClient: Super-Light Clients for Cryptocurrencies

Benedikt Bunz*, Lucianna Kiffer*, Loi Luu, and Mahdi Zamani,* co-first-authors

In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P'20),

May 2020

Flyclient has been deployed in ZCash.

Towards Optical Proof of Work

Michael Dubrovsky, Bogdan Penkovsky, Lucianna Kiffer and Marshall Ball

Cryptoeconomic Systems  Conference (CES’20),  Cambridge, MA, USA Mar 2020

Analyzing Ethereum’s Contract Topology

Lucianna Kiffer, Dave Levin, and Alan Mislove

In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'18),

Boston, MA, USA, October 2018

A Better Method to Analyze Blockchain Consistency

Lucianna Kiffer, Rajmohan Rajaraman, and abhi shelat

In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’18) Toronto, Canada, October 2018

Stick a Fork in it: Analyzing the Ethereum Network Partition

Lucianna Kiffer, Dave Levin, and Alan Mislove

In Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets'17),

Palo Alto, CA, USA, Nov 2017

AWARDS AND GRANTS

Facebook Fellowship [2020-2022]

2 year award of tuition, stipend and conference funds

DFINITY Graduate Scholarship [2019]

$10,000 scholarship  

Ethereum Foundation Research Grant [2019]

$8,000 in AWS credit

SERVICE

PhD Application Review Committee                                                        2021

Khoury College of Computer Science

Program Committee                                                                                        2020

4th Stanford Blockchain Conference    

Technical Program Committee                                                                   2019

Workshop in Blockchains and Telecommunications in IEEE GLOBECOM   

EXPERIENCE

Research Assistant                                                                July 2016 - Present

Northeastern University, Boston, MA

          Studying blockchain protocols, systems and security vulnerabilities.

Research Intern                                                                               Summer 2021

Chainlink

Developed a prototype for a fair transaction sequencing service, focusing on incentive mechanisms to prevent attacks like denial of service. Evaluated time series forecast models for gas price prediction.

Seminar Instructor                                                                         Summer 2021

Khoury College of Computer Science

CS 1800 Discrete Structures

Research Intern                                                                               Summer 2019

DAGlabs, Tel Aviv, Israel

Studied the relationship between capital and operational costs in blockchain mining and its effects on miner incentives and cost of attack.

Teaching Assistant                                                                             Spring 2019

Northeastern University, Boston, MA

CS 390  Introduction to Computer Science Research - Prof. David Choffnes

Research Intern                                                                               Summer 2018

Visa Research, Palo Alto, CA

Developed a light client protocol (FlyClient) for a succinct probabilistic proof of transaction inclusion in blockchain protocols.

Network Scientist Intern                                                             Summer 2017

Raytheon BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA

          Analyzed semantic reasoning in decentralized systems of knowledge.

Computational Biology RA                                           Aug. 2014 - May 2016

Computer Science Department, Tulane University

Created an active learning algorithm for drug discovery using Gaussian process regression and explored the effects of class imbalance.

Teaching Assistant                                                      August 2013 - May 2016

Computer Science Department, Tulane University

           Computer Science I and II, Fall 2013, Spring2014,  Fall 2014,  Fall 2015

           Computer Systems, Spring 2015

REU Combinatorics Program                                                     Summer 2015

Computer Science Department, UMD, College Park

          Experimented with game tree search and Monte Carlo methods to find exact and approximate values for Van der Waerdern game numbers.

Summer Research Fellowship                                                   Summer 2014

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Gaithersburg, Maryland

Under the supervision of Stephen Langer

Altered an outdated wrapper and scripted a system to keep track of operational commands and outputs, and created an error reporting GUI.