ohai@mark ~ $

Hi, My Name Is

I am Jin-Dong (Mark) Dong, a PhD student in CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Prof. Nicolas Christin. My research focuses on understanding and protecting users in digital environments through user behavior analytics. By analyzing patterns in how users interact with the systems, I can identify vulnerabilities and predict threats across different domains, such as assessing financial risks in cryptocurrency applications and protecting users from malicious actors online.

Before joining CMU, I received my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at National Tsing-Hua University. I did research on Neural Architecture Search (NAS) with Prof. Min Sun where we proposed a framework to automatically generate neural networks based on user demands.

Outside of work, I enjoy playing baseball, cooking (especially pasta dishes like the four pastas of Rome), and making tea-like coffee. My name in traditional Chinese (zh-TW) is 董晉東

Selected Projects

Blockchain Fraud Detection & Risk Assessment

Phishing Attack Detection, Dashboard

  • Developed and deployed a real-time detection system discovering cryptocurrency address poisoning phishing attacks amounting to more than $1M USD in weekly losses. Built high-performance analysis pipelines capable of processing Ethereum (∼ 12s / block) and Binance Smart Chain (∼ 3s / block) transactions in real time and achieved state-of-the-art detection accuracy.
  • Media: Cointelegraph
  • Publication: USENIX Security 2025, SBC 2025

Derivative Market Analysis

  • Applied blockchain forensics and clustering techniques to analyze amateur v.s., professional trading behaviors on BitMEX, one of the pioneering cryptocurrency derivative exchanges. Supported the understanding of how derivative trading impacted cryptocurrency ecosystem and sparked regulatory discussions.
  • Media: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist
  • Publication: WWW 2021

Machine Learning for Network Security & Privacy

De-anonymization of Tor Onion Traffics

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

  • Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering
  • Sep 2019 - Present
  • Pittsburgh, PA

Carnegie Mellon University

  • M.Sc. in Electrical & Computer Engineering
  • Stemmed from the PhD program, awarded Fall 2023
  • Pittsburgh, PA

National Tsing-Hua University

  • B.Sc. in Computer Science
  • Sep 2013 - Jun 2017
  • Hsinchu, Taiwan