Fortifying Decentralized Financial Systems: A Perspective on Wallet Privacy and Cross-Chain Sandwiching
📣 Lecture Series FS25 | UZH Blockchain Center
We are excited to invite you to our next lecture in the UZH Blockchain Center series, featuring Dr. Christof Ferreira Torres, a leading voice in blockchain privacy and security.
🗓 29 April 2025
🕕 18:15 CET
📍 Room KOL-E-18, Rämistrasse 71, University of Zurich
🎓 Organized by the UZH Blockchain Center
🔹 Talk Title:
Fortifying Decentralized Financial Systems: A Perspective on Wallet Privacy and Cross-Chain Sandwiching
🔹 Abstract:
In recent years, modern blockchains like Ethereum have seen a surge in adoption, largely due to their ability to support decentralized finance (DeFi)—a new class of open, permissionless financial tools accessible to anyone. The security of DeFi hinges on both the robustness of smart contracts and the order in which transactions are processed, while its privacy is closely tied to protections offered by user wallets. In this talk, we’ll begin with a brief overview of the blockchain architecture, then delve into the privacy implications of Web3 wallets and how cross-chain interoperability can give rise to exploitative financial behavior, such as cross-chain sandwich attacks. In the first part, we’ll examine how wallets can unintentionally expose user addresses to third parties and how they are increasingly being used to track users across the web. In the second part, we’ll analyze how asymmetries between Ethereum and its Layer-2 rollups create opportunities for malicious actors to exploit bridges and perform cross-chain sandwiching—a form of predatory price manipulation once thought limited to single-chain environments.
🔹 About the Speaker:
Christof Ferreira Torres is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, and a researcher at INESC-ID, where he is a member of the Distributed, Parallel and Secure Systems group. His research lies at the intersection of program analysis and software security, with a focus on improving the privacy and security aspects of blockchain systems. Before joining IST, he was a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich, where he was part of the Secure & Trustworthy Systems group. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2022 from the University of Luxembourg and the Technical University of Munich. His Ph.D. thesis focuses on the Automated Security Assessment and Improvement of Smart Contracts and has been awarded the Excellent Doctoral Thesis Award by the University of Luxembourg as well as Ripple’s UBRI Impact Award.
📬 Join us for this insightful session as we explore how to better protect users and protocols in an increasingly interconnected DeFi landscape.