ICMY: this December, the School of Computer Science at #USyd will host an absolutely incredible line-up of speakers, jointly with the SMRI (@sydmathinst.bsky.social) and the Faculty of Engineering!
🗓️ Mon 1: Bob Tarjan
🗓️ Tue 2: Moti Yung
🗓️ Wed 10: Shafi Goldwasser
Details and how to attend below! ↴
My petition to the 🇦🇺 Australian government: make part-time PhD students' stipends tax exempt!
📋 Read and sign here: www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/...
⏰ Deadline: October 1
Lastly, a new scoring system that tracks evasion behaviour using our algorithm would be more fun, and a lot more effective.
We show how easy it is to slip through. But also, how traceable those patterns are if you actually look.
I believe:
1. Static lists aren’t enough.
2. We need adaptive tagging.
3. Sanctions should follow funds, not addresses.
4. Enforcement has to think like adversaries — not just regulators.
Some services did "apply" sanctions, but it felt more like checking a box than actually stopping anything.
Sanctioning addresses without understanding the flow of money is like putting up a roadblock and hoping nobody finds a detour.
Within weeks, the vast majority had been moved out. Through new wallets. Through obfuscation. Through patterns so fast and automated, you'd think it was part of an exploit.
Together with Endong Liu, Mark Ryan, and Pascal Berrang, we studied this in our new paper: Evasion Under Blockchain Sanctions (arxiv.org/html/2507.11...)
Spoiler: the funds didn’t stay put. Not even close.
I’ve always wondered: do blockchain sanctions actually work?
You know the drill 🥱 someone adds an address to the OFAC list, wallets and frontends start blocking it, some headlines pop up… and then what? Do the funds actually stop moving?
Arthur Gervais, professor in information security at UCL, and Liyi Zhou, a lecturer in computer science at USYD, have developed an AI agent system called A1 that uses various AI models from … to develop exploits for Solidity smart contracts.
www.theregister.com/2025/07/10/a...
