Mahdi Zamani

Staff Research Scientist

Research areas: Security and Privacy, Distributed Computing, and Blockchain Protocols

Mahdi Zamani, Director, Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies.

Biography

Dr. Mahdi Zamani joined Visa Research as a Staff Research Scientist in November 2016. Mahdi received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of New Mexico in 2016. His Ph.D. work focused on scalable and provably-secure distributed algorithms that can be used to perform multi-party computation and anonymous communication efficiently in large networks. Prior to joining Visa, Mahdi was a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University, working on secure distributed algorithms for anonymous communication and multi-party computation.

As a member of the Security team, his research interests are in computer security and privacy, distributed algorithms and applied cryptography. He holds seven patents and has published 15 articles in a dozen international conferences and journals, including Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), Consortium for Computing Sciences (CCS), Systems Security Symposium (SSS), and others.

Conferences

  • Bünz, B., Kiffer, L., Luu, L., & Zamani, M. (2020). FlyClient: Super-Light Clients for Cryptocurrencies. IEEE Security and Privacy.
  • Bünz, B., Agrawal, S., & Boneh, D. (2020). Zether: Towards Privacy in a Smart Contract World. Financial Cryptography and Data Security.
  • Aggrawal, A., Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2019). Bootstrapping Public Blockchains Without a Trusted Setup (Brief Announcement). ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing.
  • Zamani, M., Movahedi, M., & Raykova, M. (2018). Rapid-Chain: Scaling Blockchain via Full Sharding. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.
  • Zamani, M., Saia, J., & Crandall, J. (2017). TorBricks: Blocking-Resistant Tor Bridge Distribution. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 426–440.
  • Dani, V., King, V., Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2016). Secure multi-party computation in large networks. Distributed Computing, 30(3), 193–229.
  • Barman, L., Zamani, M., Dacosta, I., Feigenbaum, J., Ford, B., Hubaux, J.-P., & Wolinsky, D. (2016). PriFi: A Low-Latency and Tracking-Resistant Protocol for Local-Area Anonymous Communication. Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society.
  • Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2015). Secure Multi-party Shuffling. Structural Information and Communication Complexity, 459–473.
  • Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2015). Recent Results in Scalable Multi-Party Computation. Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science, 24–44.
  • Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2015). Shuffle to Baffle: Towards Scalable Protocols for Secure Multi-party Shuffling. IEEE Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.
  • Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2014). Secure Anonymous Broadcast. Symposium on Distributed Computing.
  • Movahedi, & Zamani, M. (2014). Privacy-Preserving Location-Based Services. Symposium on Distributed Computing.
  • Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2014). Secure Location Sharing. Workshop on Foundations of Mobile Computing.
  • Khoury, J., Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2013). Towards Provably-Secure Scalable Anonymous Broadcast. USENIX Free and Open Communications on the internet.
  • Karlin, J., Khoury, J., Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2013). Scalable Anonymous Communication with Byzantine Adversary. ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing.
  • Zamani, M., Movahedi, M., Ebadzadeh, M., & Pedram, H. (2009). A DDoS-Aware IDS Model Based on Danger Theory and Mobile Agents. IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Security.
  • Zamani, M., Movahedi, M., Ebadzadeh, M., & Pedram, H. (2009). An Artificial Immune System for Detecting DDoS Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks. International Computer Society of Iran Conference.