Dr. Petar Tsankov

Senior Researcher

petar.tsankov@inf.ethz.ch
CAB H 81.1
https://www.sri.inf.ethz.ch/people/petar
View PDF

 (Last updated: )

About me

I am a senior researcher and lecturer at the Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab at ETH Zurich. My work centers around security and privacy of modern systems (deep learning, smart contracts, programmable networks) and combines techniques from the areas of programming languages, symbolic reasoning, and machine learning. As part of my research, I have co-developed several popular system, including AI2, VerX, Securify, ChainCode Scanner, DeGuard, DEBIN, SPIRE, SyNET, NetComplete, and others. I have co-founded ChainSecurity, an ETH spin-off that became a leader in formal smart contract audits. ChainSecurity was acquired by PwC Switzerland in January 2020.

I obtained my PhD and Master's degree from ETH Zurich in 2016 and 2012, respectively, and my Bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech in 2010. My research has received several prestigious awards, including the John Atanasoff Award, awarded by the President of Bulgaria (Photo, Award video: , Bloomberg TV: ) and the Best Undergraduate Researcher in Computer Science at Georgia Tech (Award video: ).

AI Survey

I'm currently studying the challenges in building robust and performant AI models. The goal to is to understand which tasks in the ML pipeline are most challenging to perform and what type of tools would benefit ML teams the most.
For anyone interested to participate in the survey, please visit the following Google form: https://forms.gle/Jm8VFXo4LFXcadyJ7. Thank you!

Publications

2024

COMPL-AI Framework: A Technical Interpretation and LLM Benchmarking Suite for the EU Artificial Intelligence Act
Philipp Guldimann, Alexander Spiridonov, Robin Staab, Nikola Jovanović, Mark Vero, Velko Vechev, Anna Gueorguieva, Mislav Balunović, Nikola Konstantinov, Pavol Bielik, Petar Tsankov, Martin Vechev
arXiv 2024

Website
Paper
Code

2022

Learning to Configure Computer Networks with Neural Algorithmic Reasoning
Luca Beurer-Kellner, Martin Vechev, Laurent Vanbever, Petar Veličković
NeurIPS 2022

Paper
Code

2021

Automated Discovery of Adaptive Attacks on Adversarial Defenses
Chengyuan Yao, Pavol Bielik, Petar Tsankov, Martin Vechev
NeurIPS 2021

Paper
Learning to Explore Paths for Symbolic Execution
Jingxuan He, Gishor Sivanrupan, Petar Tsankov, Martin Vechev
ACM CCS 2021

Slides
Paper
Code
Automated Discovery of Adaptive Attacks on Adversarial Defenses
Chengyuan Yao, Pavol Bielik, Petar Tsankov, Martin Vechev
AutoML@ICML 2021 Oral

Talk
Paper
Metha: Network Verifiers Need To Be Correct Too!
Rüdiger Birkner*, Tobias Brodmann*, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev
USENIX NSDI 2021 * Equal contribution

Slides
Talk
Paper

2020

zkay v0.2: Practical Data Privacy for Smart Contracts
Nick Baumann, Samuel Steffen, Benjamin Bichsel, Petar Tsankov, Martin Vechev
arXiv 2020

Paper
Code
Probabilistic Verification of Network Configurations
Samuel Steffen, Timon Gehr, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev
ACM SIGCOMM 2020 Best Student Paper Award

Slides
Talk
Paper
Code
VerX: Safety Verification of Smart Contracts
Anton Permenev, Dimitar Dimitrov, Petar Tsankov, Dana Drachsler-Cohen, Martin Vechev
IEEE S&P 2020

Paper

2019

zkay: Specifying and Enforcing Data Privacy in Smart Contracts
Samuel Steffen, Benjamin Bichsel, Mario Gersbach, Noa Melchior, Petar Tsankov, Martin Vechev
ACM CCS 2019

Slides
Paper
Code
Learning to Fuzz from Symbolic Execution with Application to Smart Contracts
Jingxuan He, Mislav Balunović, Nodar Ambroladze, Petar Tsankov, Martin Vechev
ACM CCS 2019

Slides
Talk
Paper
Code

2018

Towards Sparse Hierarchical Graph Classifiers
Cătălina Cangea*, Petar Veličković*, Nikola Jovanović, Thomas Kipf, Pietro Liò
Relational Representation Learning Workshop -- NeurIPS 2018 * Equal contribution

Paper
Securify: Practical Security Analysis of Smart Contracts
Petar Tsankov, Andrei Dan, Dana Drachsler-Cohen, Arthur Gervais, Florian Bünzli, Martin Vechev
ACM CCS 2018

Slides
Talk
Paper
DEBIN: Predicting Debug Information in Stripped Binaries
Jingxuan He, Pesho Ivanov, Petar Tsankov, Veselin Raychev, Martin Vechev
ACM CCS 2018

Slides
Talk
Paper
Code
DP-Finder: Finding Differential Privacy Violations by Sampling and Optimization
Benjamin Bichsel, Timon Gehr, Dana Drachsler-Cohen, Petar Tsankov, Martin Vechev
ACM CCS 2018

Slides
Talk
Paper
Code
NetHide: Secure and Practical Network Topology Obfuscation
Roland Meier, Petar Tsankov, Vincent Lenders, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev
USENIX SECURITY 2018

Paper
Inferring Crypto API Rules from Code Changes
Rumen Paletov, Petar Tsankov, Veselin Raychev, Martin Vechev
PLDI 2018

Talk
Paper
Bayonet: Probabilistic Inference for Networks
Timon Gehr, Sasa Misailovic, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Pascal Wiesmann, Martin Vechev
PLDI 2018

Talk
Paper
AI2: Safety and Robustness Certification of Neural Networks with Abstract Interpretation
Timon Gehr, Matthew Mirman, Dana Drachsler-Cohen, Petar Tsankov, Swarat Chaudhuri, Martin Vechev
IEEE S&P 2018

Slides
Talk
Paper
NetComplete: Practical Network-Wide Configuration Synthesis with Autocompletion
Ahmed El-Hassany, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev
NSDI 2018

Talk
Paper

2017

Test Execution Checkpointing for Web Applications
Marco Guarnieri, Petar Tsankov, Tristan Buchs, Mohammad Torabi Dashti, David Basin
ACM ISSTA 2017

Slides
Paper
Synthesis of Probabilistic Privacy Enforcement
Martin Kucera, Petar Tsankov, Timon Gehr, Marco Guarnieri, Martin Vechev
ACM CCS 2017

Talk
Paper
Network-wide Configuration Synthesis
Ahmed El-Hassany, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev
CAV 2017

Slides
Talk
Paper

2016

Functionality-Aware Security Enforcement
Petar Tsankov, Marco Pistoia, Omer Tripp, Martin Vechev, Pietro Ferrara
ACM ACSAC 2016

Slides
Paper
Access Control Synthesis for Physical Spaces
Petar Tsankov, Mohammad Torabi Dashti, David Basin
IEEE CSF 2016

Slides
Paper

2014

Fail-Secure Access Control
Petar Tsankov, Srdjan Marinovic, Mohammad Torabi Dashti, David Basin
ACM CCS 2014

Slides
Paper
Decentralized Composite Access Control
Petar Tsankov, Srdjan Marinovic, Mohammad Torabi Dashti, David Basin
ETAPS POST 2014

Slides
Paper

2013

Semi-Valid Input Coverage for Fuzz Testing
Petar Tsankov, Mohammad Torabi Dashti, David Basin
ACM ISSTA 2013

Slides
Paper

2012

SecFuzz: Fuzz Testing Security Protocols
Petar Tsankov, Mohammad Torabi Dashti, David Basin
IEEE/ACM AST 2012

Slides
Paper

2011

Constructing Midpoints for Two-Party Asynchronous Protocols
Petar Tsankov, Mohammad Torabi Dashti, David Basin
OPODIS 2011

Slides
Paper
Execution Hijacking: Improving Dynamic Analysis By Flying Off Course
Petar Tsankov, Wei Jin, Alessandro Orso, Saurabh Sinha
IEEE ICST 2011

Paper

Selected Talks

Certifying functional correctness of Ethereum smart contracts
Ethereum Community Conference EthCC, Paris, France, 2019

Slides
Talk
Securify: Practical Security Analysis of Smart Contracts
The Summer Research Institute (SuRI), EPFL, Switzerland 2018

Slides
Talk
TECHNOLOGY PANEL: Already a Next Level of Blockchain?
Blockchain Summit, Zug, Switzerland 2018

Talk
DeGuard: Statistical Deobfuscation for Android
Android Security Symposium, Vienna, Austria 2017

Slides
Talk

Internships

IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, New York, USA
May - Aug 2014
Topic: Functionality-aware Security Enforcement
Patent 1: Self-repair and distributed-repair of applications
Patent 2: Providing efficient information tracking with dynamically selected precision
Patent 3: Value based information tracking for security enforcement

Slides
Paper

Grants

Ethereum Foundation Grants Wave 3
Topic: Extensible audit platform for smart contracts

Service