Dr Christof Ferreira Torres

His research journey began with privacy and security questions in conventional computing environments. Early work examined browser fingerprinting, Android tracking behaviour and trajectory anonymisation, establishing a foundation in web privacy, empirical measurement and security analysis. He later moved decisively into blockchain research, where public transaction histories and immutable smart-contract code created new opportunities for rigorous, large-scale investigation.

Dr Torres completed a joint doctoral degree in Computer Science at the University of Luxembourg and the Technical University of Munich between 2018 and 2022. His doctoral research focused on automated approaches for securing Ethereum smart contracts, producing practical systems for finding integer bugs, detecting honeypots, identifying attacks in historical blockchain data, fuzzing smart contracts and patching vulnerable bytecode — connecting program analysis with evidence from millions of contracts and transactions.

After the doctorate, he continued this trajectory as a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich from 2022 to 2024. His research expanded from individual smart-contract weaknesses to ecosystem-level questions: front-running, maximal extractable value, DeFi market manipulation, wallet privacy, block construction and security across Ethereum and Layer-2 networks. In 2024 he joined Instituto Superior Técnico, where he combines research, teaching and student supervision in blockchain security, program analysis and formal verification.

A defining feature of his work is the movement from vulnerability discovery to real-world impact measurement. Systems such as HoneyBadger, ConFuzzius, Horus and Elysium have helped expose deceptive contracts, detect attacks, generate security tests and repair vulnerable bytecode. His empirical studies also make adversarial blockchain behaviour measurable, tracing profits, transaction ordering and privacy leakage across decentralised markets — actionable evidence for protocol designers, auditors, developers and policymakers.

With more than 60 scholarly works and a Google Scholar h-index of 18, Dr Torres has built a substantial research record in blockchain and software security. His publications span leading security and measurement venues, including USENIX Security, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, ACM Internet Measurement Conference, RAID, ACM AsiaCCS and Financial Cryptography.