Vidal Attias

PhD candidate at CEA List and Loria

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I am a final-year Cybersecurity PhD candidate at CEA List and Loria, supervised by Grégoire Menguy, Sébastien Bardin, and Jean-Yves Marion. My research is supported by the French national priority program PEPR Cyber/DefMal.

My work focuses on low-level reverse engineering and automated code deobfuscation, specializing in black-box semantic analysis. My research drives the development of new symbolic approaches for the state-of-the-art Xyntia synthesizer, pushing the boundaries of automated binary deobfuscation.

Our latest work on this topic was accepted at CCS'25 (read it here).

I am an alumnus of École normale supérieure (ENS) Rennes and the MPRI (Parisian Master of Research in Computer Science). Prior to my PhD, I was a Junior Researcher at the IOTA Foundation, where I focused on Verifiable Delay Functions (VDF) and their integration into DLT protocols. This trajectory has built my core expertise in applied cryptography, multi-precision computing (OpenSSL), and low-level protocol security.


Publications

Work Experience

Junior Researcher

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IOTA Foundation | 2019 - Present

As part of the Network team for the Coordicide project, I led research on Verifiable Delay Functions (VDF) in collaboration with the VDF Alliance (including Ethereum and Tezos). My work focused on multi-exponentiation algorithms and multi-precision computing, resulting in several publications. I also contributed to the design and simulation of congestion control and sharding solutions for DLT protocols.

Research Intern

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École normale supérieure | Summer 2021

Conducted research under the supervision of Pr. David Naccache, focusing on blockchain arithmetic and the mathematical visualization of Tangle structures.

Research Intern

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ICube - Strasbourg University | May - August 2018

Developed a C++ simulator to model the Tangle network, leading to the mathematical characterization of the model and the design of two novel network compression algorithms.
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