Mahdi Zamani

Director

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

Mahdi Zamani, Director, Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies.

Mahdi is the Director of the Digital Currencies Research team at Visa Research. He joined Visa as a Staff Research Scientist in November 2016 after finishing his postdoctoral studies at Yale University. Mahdi received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of New Mexico in 2015. 

At Visa Research, Mahdi is building the next generation of financial systems that rely on digital currencies including fully decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum as well as semi-decentralized ones like stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Mahdi’s typical workday consists of meetings with scientists, product managers, engineers, financial experts, and business leads. 

Mahdi enjoys designing cryptographic protocols that live on distributed systems (e.g., blockchains) to process payments at a massive scale with mathematical resilience guarantees against faults and corruptions. He also loves biking, hiking, and working from public places like coffeeshops and restaurants.

Conferences

  1. Bünz, B., Kiffer, L., Luu, L., & Zamani, M. (2020). FlyClient: Super-Light Clients for Cryptocurrencies. IEEE Security and Privacy.
  2. Bünz, B., Agrawal, S., & Boneh, D. (2020). Zether: Towards Privacy in a Smart Contract World. Financial Cryptography and Data Security.
  3. 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.
  4. Zamani, M., Movahedi, M., & Raykova, M. (2018). Rapid-Chain: Scaling Blockchain via Full Sharding. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.
  5. Zamani, M., Saia, J., & Crandall, J. (2017). TorBricks: Blocking-Resistant Tor Bridge Distribution. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 426–440.
  6. Dani, V., King, V., Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2016). Secure multi-party computation in large networks. Distributed Computing, 30(3), 193–229.
  7. 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.
  8. Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2015). Secure Multi-party Shuffling. Structural Information and Communication Complexity, 459–473.
  9. 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.
  10. Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2015). Shuffle to Baffle: Towards Scalable Protocols for Secure Multi-party Shuffling. IEEE Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.
  11. Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2014). Secure Anonymous Broadcast. Symposium on Distributed Computing.
  12. Movahedi, & Zamani, M. (2014). Privacy-Preserving Location-Based Services. Symposium on Distributed Computing.
  13. Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2014). Secure Location Sharing. Workshop on Foundations of Mobile Computing.
  14. Khoury, J., Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2013). Towards Provably-Secure Scalable Anonymous Broadcast. USENIX Free and Open Communications on the internet.
  15. Karlin, J., Khoury, J., Movahedi, M., Saia, J., & Zamani, M. (2013). Scalable Anonymous Communication with Byzantine Adversary. ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.