Opening Members Teaching Publication Research SDSL Home

Secure Decentralized Systems Lab

The mission of Secure Decentralized Systems Lab (SDSL) at University of Kentucky Computer Science is to build communication and computing paradigms that are secure, usable, and require minimal involvement of trusted third parties. We develop security/privacy mechanisms for emerging decentralized applications and decentralized alternatives to traditional systems, leveraging techniques from distributed computing, cryptography, protocol design, and new hardware capabilities. Decentralization is not our ultimate goal; rather, it is a guiding principle for building resilient systems that can thrive in dynamic, adversarial environments. SDSL is directed by Dr. Yang Xiao and receives funding support from NSF and ONR.

Research Interests

Decentralized systems — identity and access management, consensus protocol security and usability, secure Web3 applications.
Autonomous IoT — secure ad hoc communication, key management, security mechanisms for collaborative autonomy.
Mobile networks — subscriber privacy protection, authentication, spectrum access management.

News

◾  01/2025: Our paper "DEXO: A Secure and Fair Exchange Mechanism for Decentralized IoT Data Markets" was accepted by IEEE IoT Journal.
◾  12/2024: We received a subaward grant from Virginia Tech to work on Byzantine-resilient decentralized federated learning in sporadically connected wireless networks. (originating sponsor: ONR)
◾  11/2024: Our paper on federated learning model inversion attacks accepted by NDSS 2025.
◾  10/2024: Dr. Xiao delivered a guest talk at UK_CYBERCON 2024 on robocall blocking.
◾  08/2024: Welcome Sudip to our lab!
◾  06/2024: Congrats to Ifteher on receiving the Lighthouse Beacon Foundation Endowment Graduate Fellow award!
◾  05/2024: Dr. Xiao was invited to serve on the technical program committee of INFOCOM 2025 and MILCOM 2024.
◾  04/2024: Dr. Xiao gave a remote guest lecture on distributed consensus protocols to the Blockchain and Applications class at CUHK Information Engineering.
◾  02/2024: Dr. Xiao was invited to serve on the program committee of ACSAC 2024.
◾  12/2023: Our paper "TriSAS: Toward Dependable Inter-SAS Coordination with Auditability" was accepted by ASIACCS 2024.
◾  12/2023: Dr. Xiao was interviewed by University of Kentucky News (UKNow) and Lex 18 (NBC) on our anti-mobile tracking project.
◾  10/2023: Dr. Xiao was interviewed by Fox 56 News on mobile secuity issues about online sports betting.
◾  09/2023: Our paper "AAKA: An Anti-Tracking Cellular Authentication Scheme Leveraging Anonymous Credentials" was accepted by NDSS 2024.

◾  08/2023: Our paper "Bijack: Breaking Bitcoin Network with TCP Vulnerabilities" was accepted to ESORICS 2023.
◾  07/2023: Our paper "CANShield: Deep Learning-Based Intrusion Detection Framework for Controller Area Networks at the Signal-Level" was accepted to IEEE IoT Journal.
◾  05/2023: Dr. Xiao started serving as a TPC Member for IEEE INFOCOM 2024 and MILCOM 2023.
◾  04/2023: Our collaborative Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) project was awarded by the National Science Foundation. (NSF page)
◾  03/2023: Our paper "MS-PTP: Protecting Network Timing from Byzantine Attacks" was accepted by ACM WiSec 2023.
◾  02/2023: Our paper "ARI: Attestation of Real-time Mission Execution Integrity" was accepted by USENIX Security 2023.
◾  12/2022: Our paper "A Decentralized Truth Discovery Approach to the Blockchain Oracle Problem" was accepted by IEEE INFOCOM 2023.
◾  11/2022: Dr. Xiao gave a remote talk titled "Blockchain and Trusted Execution Environment: Security Properties, Synergies, and a Privacy Application" to the Delta 2022 Cybersecurity Conference at UTN Facultad Regional Delta, Argentina.
◾  10/2022: Our paper "SofitMix: A Secure Offchain-Supported Bitcoin-Compatible Mixing Protocol" was accepted by IEEE TDSC.
◾  09/2022: Our paper "Squeezing More Utility via Adaptive Clipping on Deferentially Private Gradients in Federated Meta-Learning" was accepted by ACSAC 2022.
◾  08/2022: Dr. Xiao started the Assistant Professor position at Dept. of CS, University of Kentucky.
◾  06/2022: Xiao started serving the Web Co-chair of INFOCOM 2023.
◾  05/2022: Xiao successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation "Blockchain and Distributed Consensus: From Security Analysis to Novel Applications".
◾  04/2022: Our paper "CANShield: Signal-based Intrusion Detection for Controller Area Networks" was accepted by escar USA conference 2022.
◾  02/2022: Our paper "FLARE: Defending Federated Learning against Model Poisoning Attacks via Latent Space Representations" was accepted by ASIACCS 2022.
◾  02/2022: Our paper "MANDA: On Adversarial Example Detection for Network Intrusion Detection System" was accepted by IEEE TDSC.
◾  12/2021: Our paper "Decentralized Spectrum Access System: Vision, Challenges, and a Blockchain Solution" was accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications.