Smart Contracts, Smarter Security: NTU-Led Team Wins Distinguished Paper Award at NDSS 2025

In a field where precision is everything and the stakes are sky-high, a team of researchers co-led by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) has taken home top honours at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2025, one of the world’s premier stages for cybersecurity research. 

Their paper — PropertyGPT: LLM-driven Formal Verification of Smart Contracts through Retrieval-Augmented Property Generation — clinched the Distinguished Paper Award, standing out among hundreds of submissions for its cutting-edge blend of artificial intelligence and formal methods.

But this wasn’t just any paper. The seven-member team broke new ground by leveraging large language models (LLMs) — the same tech behind generative AI tools — to automatically verify the security of smart contracts, the digital lifeblood of blockchain ecosystems. By integrating retrieval-augmented property generation, they’ve made a notoriously complex process faster, smarter, and more reliable.

The cross-institutional dream team includes:

• Dr Ye LIU (Singapore Management University, former NTU PhD student)
• Yue XUE (MetaTrust Labs)
• Dr Daoyuan WU (HKUST)
• Yuqiang SUN, Prof Yi LI, and Prof Yang LIU (NTU)
• Miaolei SHI (MetaTrust Labs)
  

This win isn’t just about academic prestige. It signals a leap forward in how AI can be applied to real-world cybersecurity problems, setting the stage for smarter, safer digital economies. And it reaffirms NTU’s role as a nexus for high-impact, interdisciplinary research that resonates far beyond the lab.

Read the award-winning paper here:
PropertyGPT on NDSS Website

Explore more from NDSS 2025:
NDSS 2025 Official Site