Sifis Lagouvardos

About Me

I am a postdoctoral researcher at TU Wien working with Maria Christakis. I completed my Ph.D. at the PLAST lab at the University of Athens under the supervision of Yannis Smaragdakis. My Ph.D. research was mainly focused on designing and implementing static analysis techniques for the decompilation and vulnerability detection of smart contracts running on the Ethereum platform. The vast majority of this work is built on top of the Gigahorse lifting and analysis framework. Past projects include Pythia, a static analysis tool for the detection of shape related bugs in Python programs using the TensorFlow framework.

Research Interests

• Program Analysis: static analysis, symbolic execution, fuzzing for detecting bugs, vulnerabilities and optimization opportunities
• Security: information-flow, decompilation, reverse engineering

Publications

• Precise Static Identification of Ethereum Storage Variables
  Sifis Lagouvardos, Yannis Bollanos, Michael Debono, Neville Grech, Yannis Smaragdakis
  Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE/ACM 48th International Conference on Software Engineering ICSE 2026.
  [DOI] [arxiv] [Artifact] [PDF-Extended]

• The Incredible Shrinking Context… in a Decompiler Near You
  Sifis Lagouvardos, Yannis Bollanos, Neville Grech, Yannis Smaragdakis
  Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering. ISSTA 2025.
  [DOI] [arxiv] [PDF] [Artifact] [PDF-Extended]

• Program Analysis for High-Value Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: Techniques and Insights
  Yannis Smaragdakis, Neville Grech, Sifis Lagouvardos, Konstantinos Triantafyllou, Ilias Tsatiris, Yannis Bollanos, Tony Rocco Valentine
  The Science of Blockchain Conference 2023. SBC 2023.
  [PDF]

• Elipmoc: Advanced Decompilation of Ethereum Smart Contracts
  Neville Grech, Sifis Lagouvardos, Ilias Tsatiris, Yannis Smaragdakis
  Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. OOPSLA 2022.
  [DOI] [PDF] [Video]

• Symbolic Value-Flow Static Analysis: Deep, Precise, Complete Modeling of Ethereum Smart Contracts
  Yannis Smaragdakis, Neville Grech, Sifis Lagouvardos, Konstantinos Triantafyllou, Ilias Tsatiris
  Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. OOPSLA 2021.
  [DOI] [PDF] [Artifact] [Video]

• Precise static modeling of Ethereum “memory”
  Sifis Lagouvardos, Neville Grech, Ilias Tsatiris, Yannis Smaragdakis
  Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. OOPSLA 2020.
  [DOI] [PDF] [Artifact] [Video]

• Static Analysis of Shape in TensorFlow Programs
  Sifis Lagouvardos, Julian Dolby, Neville Grech, Anastasios Antoniadis, Yannis Smaragdakis
  34th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2020.
  [DOI] [PDF] [Artifact] [Video]

• Ethainter: a smart contract security analyzer for composite vulnerabilities
  Lexi Brent, Neville Grech, Sifis Lagouvardos, Bernhard Scholz, Yannis Smaragdakis
  Proceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation. PLDI 2020.
  [DOI] [PDF] [Artifact] [Video]

Service

• OOPSLA 2027 Review Committee Member
• PLDI 2026 Artifact Evaluation Committee Member
• PLDI 2025 Artifact Evaluation Committee Member
• SAS 2022 Artifact Evaluation Committee Member

Blog Posts

• I See Dead Code
  What if I told you that over one-third of recently-deployed Ethereum smart contracts consist mostly of unusable junk?
  10 Feb 2023