Mingfei Zhang

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Cybersecurity at the School of Cyberspace Science and Technology, Shandong University, where I also received my undergraduate degree. I am jointly advised by Prof. Xiaoyun Wang and Prof. Sisi Duan. My research focuses on blockchain security, consensus protocol analysis, and incentive mechanism design — with an emphasis on discovering and fixing real-world vulnerabilities in production systems such as Ethereum PoS and Polkadot NPoS. Research outcomes have been adopted into official Ethereum upgrade proposals.

mingfei.zh@outlook.com Mart1i1n CV

Publications

2025

Available Attestation: Towards a Reorg-Resilient Solution for Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

Mingfei Zhang, Rujia Li, Xueqian Lu, and Sisi Duan.

USENIX Security 2025

The proposal now is one of headliner EIPs for Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade.

2024

Vision Paper: Do We Need Standardization of Blockchain Consensus?

Zhaoxin Yang, Xiao Sui, Mingfei Zhang, Rujia Li, Sisi Duan.

SSR 2024

Max Attestation Matters: Making Honest Parties Lose Their Incentives in Ethereum PoS

Mingfei Zhang, Rujia Li, and Sisi Duan.

USENIX Security 2024

Grants & Honors

National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) — Youth Student Basic Research Project (Ph.D.) 2026
Principal Investigator
National Scholarship 2025
Doctoral level, Shandong University
First-Class Academic Scholarship 2023, 2024
Shandong University

Academic Service

External reviewer / subreviewer for IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, ACM CCS and NDSS.

Experience

WeBank Apr. 2026 – Jun. 2026

Blockchain Research Intern

Contributed to Layer 2 protocol development, focusing on scalability and security of permissioned blockchain infrastructure.