Sophie Rain

TU Wien
Favoritenstrasse 9-11, 1040 Vienna
sophie.rain@tuwien.ac.at
GitHubsophierain
LinkedInSophie Rain
orcid0000-0001-7203-6641

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About Me

I am a computer science PhD student at TU Vienna's FORSYTE group under the supervision of Laura Kovács.

As a mathematician by training, my studies taught me to be precise and use an unambiguous and gap free notation in proofs. My computer science PhD on the other hand showed me that developing an interesting theoretic concept is nice but it is even more fun to automate it in a second step. Thus, I enjoy working in Formal Methods combining both the mathematical and the computer science aspects of logic and reasoning.


My main research interests are Logic, Security of Blockchain Applications, Game Theory and Automated Reasoning.

If you are a student at TU Wien interested in semester projects, Bachelor or Master theses, please feel free to reach out! The same holds for anyone who is curious about my work. I am happy to have a chat with you!

Research

In my PhD I work on the game-theoretic security of Blockchain protocols . That means, I am developing a framework to mathematically prove the game-theoretic aspects of protocols secure. When studying the security of Blockchain protocols, often only cryptographic properties are considered, while the game-theoretic ones are overlooked. In the high-level example of online banking a cryptographic security property would be that a password cannot be accessed by unauthorized users. A game-theoretic one on the other hand is that no one wants to share their password with others.

The security properties we are interested in are incentive-compatibility and Byzantine-fault-tolerance . Together they ensure that no party, irrespective of their goals, has a reason to deviate from the protocol.

As the mentioned security properties are defined based on game theory, our framework requires the analyzed protocol to be modeled as a game in a first step. In a collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation we are currently working on automating this process for protocols specified entirely as Smart Contracts.

We further developed CheckMate, our open source tool to automatically verify the game-theoretic security of protocols modeled as games. More details on this can be found in the CheckMate section.

Academia

Publications

Scaling CheckMate for Game-Theoretic Security

with Lea Brugger, Laura Kovács, Anja Petković Komel, and Michael Rawson

Conference on Logic for Programming, AI and Reasoning (LPAR 2024)

CheckMate: Automated Game-Theoretic Security Reasoning

with Lea Brugger, Laura Kovács, Anja Petković Komel, and Michael Rawson

Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2023)

Reshaping Unplugged Computer Science Workshops for Primary School Education

with Martina Landmann, Laura Kovács and Gerald Futschek

International Conference on Informatics in Schools: Situation, Evolution, and Perspectives (ISSEP 2023)

Towards Game-Theoretical Security Analysis of Off-Chain Protocols

with Georgia Avarikioti, Laura Kovács, and Matteo Maffei

Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF 2023)

Automating Security Analysis of Off-Chain Protocols

with Lea Brugger, Laura Kovács, Anja Petković Komel, and Michael Rawson

4th International Workshop on Formal Methods for Blockchains (FMBC 2022)

Summing Up Smart Contracts

with Neta Elad, Neil Immerman, Laura Kovács, and Mooly Sagiv

International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2021)

Awards

Teaching

I was involved in the following teaching activities at TU Wien:

Academic CV

Further details can be found in my academic CV.

CheckMate

CheckMate is our automated game-theoretic security reasoning tool. It takes an extensive form game model of a protocol as input and decides its game-theoretic security. Additionally, among other features, if a game model was not secure, CheckMate can provide counterexamples and weakest precondtitions, that if added as preconditions, make the game model secure. If the analyzed game model was secure, CheckMate can present a witness behavior. The tool is available here. Be aware that CheckMate is constantly evolving, the latest stable version is tagged "lpar25".

Abenteuer Informatik

Together with colleagues from TU Wien's computer science didactics group eduLAB, we developed computer science workshops for Austrian primary schools called Abenteuer Informatik für Volksschule. All information including the possibility to book a spot can be found here. EduLAB offers all kinds of cool computer science content for everybody and provides a great overview on their homepage.

Blog

As part of my NetIdee stipend, I regularly write blog articles about my research for a broad audience.