I am a Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering at the Information Security Group of the Computer Science department at University College London. I am also a faculty fellow at the Turing Institute.
From Sept. 2018 I am part time at UCL to focus on a number of commercialization & industrial activities. This webpage will be kept up to date in relation to my research work.
Research interests: I research systems security, privacy, and in particular anonymous communications, traffic analysis, statistical inference, smart metering and peer-to-peer security, and distributed systems security. I have a special interest in the application of modern machine learning to security problems, decentralization, as well as distributed ledgers. You can see my full CV and a short bio.
Group: Within the Information Security group, I currently supervise Jamie Hayes, Raphael Toledo, Marios Isaakidis, Vasilis Mavroudis, and Maria Schett. Ania Piotrowska, Mustafa Al-Bassam, and Alberto Sonnino have graduated with a doctorate. In the past, Shehar Bano and Sebastian Meiser were a post-doctoral member of my team.
Funding and other activities: My research has been funded by the EU (Panoramix, Nextleap, Decode), the EPSRC, MSR, ACE (GCHQ) and UCL. I sit on the board of the PET Symposium, and the ACM CCS and IH&MMS steering committees. I am a fellow of the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy, and on the advisory board of the Simply Secure Project, the Open Rights Group and before Privacy International. I am open to short-term consultancy engagements around computer security and privacy research, or design reviews, through UCL Consultants.
All Privacy Anonymity Machine Learning Peer-to-peer & Blockchains Crypto Policy & Econ Social Applications Tor Location Identity Security Data
2015 - 2020
2010 - 2015
2005 - 2010
2000 - 2005
I was a co-founder, and chief scientist at chainspace.io, which built a scalable smart contract platform. The chanspace team was aquired by facebook in Feb 2019, and I helped design the Novi wallet and Diem payment system until Jul 2021. Before joining UCL I was a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge from 2007 to 2013. Between 2005 and 2007 I was a post-doctoral visiting fellow at Prof. Bart Preneel's COSIC group at K.U.Leuven, Belgium. With Claudia Diaz we were coordinating the COSIC Privacy Group. Until 2005 I was a research assistant in the Security Group, of the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, working on anonymous communications, peer-to-peer networks and censorship resistance where I got my Ph.D under the supervision of Prof. Ross J. Anderson, in the security group. My doctoral thesis entitled Better Anonymous Communications and the associated technical report Designing and Attacking Anonymous Communication Systems (UCAM-CL-TR-594) are available. I received my B.A. (Hons) in Computer Science from Queens' College, where I am a foundation scholar.