George Danezis Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering

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Address:
University College London
Dept. of Computer Science
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom
Email: g.danezis at ucl.ac.uk

I am a Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering at the Information Security Group of the Computer Science department at University College London.

Since November 2021, I work as Co-founder & Chief Scientist at MystenLabs, where I co-designed and engineered the Sui smart contract platform and the Narwhal/Tusk consensus protocols. I maintain a part-time affiliation with UCL for research and supervision.

Research interests: I research blockchain consensus protocols, Byzantine fault-tolerant systems, and distributed ledger security. My work spans DAG-based consensus mechanisms, smart contract execution, privacy-preserving systems, and decentralized storage. I also have extensive experience in anonymous communications, traffic analysis, statistical inference, and the application of machine learning to security and privacy problems. You can see my full CV and a short bio.

Group: Within the Information Security group, in the past I have supervised Jamie Hayes, Raphael Toledo, Marios Isaakidis, Vasilis Mavroudis, Maria Schett, Ania Piotrowska, Mustafa Al-Bassam, and Alberto Sonnino. Shehar Bano and Sebastian Meiser were post-doctoral researchers in my team.

Funding and other activities: My research has been funded by the EU (Panoramix, Nextleap, Decode), the EPSRC, MSR, ACE (GCHQ) and UCL. In the past, I sat on the board of the PET Symposium, and the ACM CCS and IH&MMS steering committees. I was 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 Privacy International.

Publications

All Blockchain Consensus Smart Contracts Distributed Systems Privacy Anonymity Mix Networks Crypto Machine Learning Tor Applications Identity Location Policy & Econ

Pre-prints New!

Recent and Forthcoming

Published

2020 - 2025

2015 - 2020

2010 - 2015

2005 - 2010

2000 - 2005

Unpublished manuscripts / lecture notes / invited talks / hard science

Biographical details

Since November 2021, I have been co-founder and chief scientist at MystenLabs, where I co-designed and engineered the Sui smart contract platform and the Narwhal/Tusk consensus protocols that form the core products of the company. Before MystenLabs, I co-founded chainspace.io, which built a scalable smart contract platform based on sharded Byzantine consensus. The Chainspace team was acquired by Facebook in February 2019, where I subsequently helped design the Novi wallet and Diem (formerly Libra) payment system until July 2021.

I joined University College London as a member of faculty in 2013, where I remain a Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering. Prior to joining UCL, I was a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge from 2007 to 2013, focusing on privacy-enhancing technologies and statistical inference. From 2005 to 2007, I was a post-doctoral visiting fellow at the COSIC research group at K.U.Leuven, Belgium, led by Prof. Bart Preneel, where Claudia Diaz and I coordinated the COSIC Privacy Group.

I received my Ph.D. in 2005 from the Security Group at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Prof. Ross J. Anderson. My doctoral research focused on anonymous communications, peer-to-peer networks, and censorship resistance. My thesis Better Anonymous Communications and the technical report Designing and Attacking Anonymous Communication Systems (UCAM-CL-TR-594) are available online. I received my B.A. (Hons) in Computer Science from Queens' College, Cambridge, where I was a foundation scholar.

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