Update (25/05/2021): I am no longer at UCL, having graduated with a PhD. This page is no longer updated. My thesis was on Securely Scaling Blockchain Base Layers. I am now working to commercialise my work on LazyLedger.

I was a PhD student at the Information Security Research Group of the Department of Computer Science at University College London. I joined in October 2016. My supervisors were Professor George Danezis and Professor Sarah Meiklejohn.

My research interests include the intersections of peer-to-peer systems, distributed ledgers and information security.

Email: m.albassam@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Links: Personal Homepage / Twitter / GitHub / LinkedIn

Peer-reviewed publications

• SoK: Communication Across Distributed Ledgers
  Alexei Zamyatin, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Dionysis Zindros, Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Aggelos Kiayias and William J. Knottenbelt.
  Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), 2021.

• Fraud and Data Availability Proofs: Detecting Invalid Blocks in Light Clients
  Mustafa Al-Bassam, Alberto Sonnino, Vitalik Buterin and Ismail Khoffi.
  Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), 2021.

• Replay Attacks and Defenses Against Cross-shard Consensus in Sharded Distributed Ledgers
  Alberto Sonnino, Shehar Bano, Mustafa Al-Bassam and George Danezis.
  IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2020.

• SoK: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains
  Shehar Bano, Alberto Sonnino, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Sarah Azouvi, Patrick McCorry, Sarah Meiklejohn and George Danezis.
  Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT), 2019.

• Proof-of-Prestige: A Useful Work Reward System for Unverifiable Tasks
  Michał Krol, Alberto Sonnino, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Argyrios Tasiopoulos and Ioannis Psaras.
  IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC), 2019.

• Coconut: Threshold Issuance Selective Disclosure Credentials with Applications to Distributed Ledgers
  Alberto Sonnino, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Shehar Bano, Sarah Meiklejohn and George Danezis.
  The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2019.

• Contour: A Practical System for Binary Transparency
  Mustafa Al-Bassam and Sarah Meiklejohn.
  International Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology (CBT), 2018.

• Chainspace: A Sharded Smart Contracts Platform
  Mustafa Al-Bassam, Alberto Sonnino, Shehar Bano, Dave Hrycyszyn and George Danezis.
  The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2018.

• Who Am I? Secure Identity Registration on Distributed Ledgers
  Sarah Azouvi, Mustafa Al-Bassam and Sarah Meiklejohn.
  International Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology (CBT), 2017.

• SCPKI: A Smart Contract-based PKI and Identity System
  Mustafa Al-Bassam.
  ACM Workshop on Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (BCC), 2017.

• Take-away TV: Recharging Work Commutes with Predictive Preloading of Catch-up TV Content
  Dmytro Karamshuk, Nishanth Sastry, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Andy Secker and Jigna Chandaria.
  IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (J-SAC), 2016.

Preprints

• LazyLedger: A Distributed Data Availability Ledger With Client-Side Smart Contracts
  Mustafa Al-Bassam.

• Airtnt: Fair Exchange Payment for Outsourced Secure Enclave Computations
  Mustafa Al-Bassam, Alberto Sonnino, Michał Król and Ioannis Psaras.

• VAMS: Verifiable Auditing of Access to Confidential Data
  Alexander Hicks, Vasilis Mavroudis, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Sarah Meiklejohn and Steven J. Murdoch.