Rate My Professor Kai Li

Kai Li, Ph.D., served as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science within the College of Sciences at San Diego State University. He earned his Ph.D. from Syracuse University in May 2022, advised by Dr. Yuzhe (Richard) Tang. Prior to his academic career, he gained industry experience at leading technology companies, including Amazon AWS and IBM Research. At SDSU, Li contributed to the Cybersecurity Program Office, specializing in Blockchain Security. His research focuses on distributed system security, network security, cybercrime detection and prevention, and performance analysis and optimization. Key areas include hardening the security of blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin across system layers, identifying denial-of-service vulnerabilities in blockchain peer-to-peer networks, detecting cryptocurrency scams and phishing on social networks, and optimizing blockchain P2P performance.

Li's scholarship is recognized in top-tier venues such as USENIX Security 2024, ACM CCS 2024, EuroS&P 2023, IEEE Blockchain 2023, ACM SIGMETRICS 2024, NDSS, ACM IMC, ESEC/FSE, and ACM Middleware. Prominent publications include 'As Strong As Its Weakest Link: How to Break Blockchain DApps at RPC Service' (NDSS 2021), 'Deter: Denial of Ethereum Txpool Services' (ACM CCS 2021), 'TopoShot: Uncovering Ethereum's Network Topology Leveraging Replacement Transactions' (ACM IMC 2021), 'ChainFS: Blockchain-secured Cloud Storage' (IEEE CLOUD 2018), and 'Cost-effective Data Feeds to Blockchains via Workload-adaptive Data Replication' (ACM Middleware 2020). His work has earned grants from the Ethereum Foundation, including 'ETH Rangers' (2025), 'Run A Node' (2023), and an Academic Grant (2023), as well as an NSF CRII award (2024). Research findings have been acknowledged by blockchain bug bounty programs, influencing developer communities. Li delivered a colloquium at SDSU's Computational Science Research Center on blockchain security risks. One of his SDSU students received the Outstanding Computer Science Master Student award (2024).