George Danezis

Last updated
George Danezis
George Danezis 2000.jpg
Danezis as a PhD student at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in January 2000
Born
George Danezis

(1979-12-06) 6 December 1979 (age 43)
NationalityGreek and French [1]
Alma mater University of Cambridge
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Thesis Better Anonymous Communications  (2004)
Doctoral advisor Ross Anderson
Website http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/g.danezis/

George Danezis, FBCS [2] (born 6 December 1979) [1] is a computer scientist and Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering at the Department of Computer Science, University College London where he is part of the Information Security Research Group, [4] [5] and a fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. [2] [6] [7] He co-founded Chainspace, a sharded smart contract platform, [8] [9] [4] and was Head of Research before it was acquired by Facebook. [8] [9] [4] [10] After leaving Facebook he co-founded MystenLabs and is one of the designers of the Sui Blockchain. [11] He currently works part-time as a Professor at University College London and as Chief Scientist at MystenLabs.

Contents

Education

Danezis was educated at the University of Cambridge where he received a BA in Computer Science and a PhD in Computer Science. His PhD was supervised by Ross Anderson, where he completed his thesis on anonymous communications. [6] [2] [1] [12]

Career and research

Before joining University College London, Danezis worked as a researcher at KU Leuven in Belgium and Microsoft Research in Cambridge. He has published research on anonymous communications and computer security. [3]

In 2005, Danezis and Steven Murdoch published research [13] [14] showing that the Tor anonymity network was susceptible to traffic analysis that allowed adversaries to reduce the anonymity provided by Tor by inferring the network nodes that relay the anonymous data.

He has contributed to the design of anonymity networks including Hornet [15] [16] [17] and Loopix, [18] as well as the Sphinx packet format. [19] [20]

He has also contributed to the design of cryptocurrency systems, including RSCoin, a centrally banked cryptocurrency, [21] [22] and Chainspace, a sharded distributed ledger, [23] which was spun-out into a commercial company [8] and subsequently the first blockchain start-up acquired by Facebook. [4] [10]

Awards and honours

Danezis was recognised as a Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2014, [2] an award given to those who "demonstrate a commitment to advancing standards; strategic leadership and best practice, and encourage this in others". [24]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Chaum</span> American computer scientist and cryptographer

David Lee Chaum is an American computer scientist, cryptographer, and inventor. He is known as a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies, and widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash. His 1982 dissertation "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups" is the first known proposal for a blockchain protocol. Complete with the code to implement the protocol, Chaum's dissertation proposed all but one element of the blockchain later detailed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. He has been referred to as "the father of online anonymity", and "the godfather of cryptocurrency".

The Free Haven Project was formed in 1999 by a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students with the aim to develop a secure, decentralized system of data storage. The group's work led to a collaboration with the United States Naval Research Laboratory to develop Tor, funded by DARPA.

A Sybil attack is a type of attack on a computer network service in which an attacker subverts the service's reputation system by creating a large number of pseudonymous identities and uses them to gain a disproportionately large influence. It is named after the subject of the book Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. The name was suggested in or before 2002 by Brian Zill at Microsoft Research. The term pseudospoofing had previously been coined by L. Detweiler on the Cypherpunks mailing list and used in the literature on peer-to-peer systems for the same class of attacks prior to 2002, but this term did not gain as much influence as "Sybil attack".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tor (network)</span> Free and open-source anonymity network based on onion routing

Tor, short for "The Onion Router," is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic via a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network that consists of more than seven thousand relays.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steven Murdoch</span> British computer security expert

Steven James Murdoch is Professor of Security Engineering in the Computer Science Department, University College London. His research covers privacy-enhancing technology, Internet censorship, and anonymous communication, in particular Tor. He is also known for discovering several vulnerabilities in the EMV bank chipcard payment system and for creating Tor Browser.

Internet censorship circumvention, also referred to as going over the wall or scientific browsing in China, is the use of various methods and tools to bypass internet censorship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bitcoin network</span> Peer-to-peer network that processes and records bitcoin transactions

The Bitcoin network is a peer-to-peer network of nodes which implement the Bitcoin protocol. The protocol itself implements a highly available, public, and decentralized ledger. The nodes verify that each update to the ledger follows the rules of the Bitcoin protocol.

Zerocoin is a privacy protocol proposed in 2013 by Johns Hopkins University professor Matthew D. Green and his graduate students, Ian Miers and Christina Garman. It was designed as an extension to the Bitcoin protocol that would improve Bitcoin transactions' anonymity by having coin-mixing capabilities natively built into the protocol. Zerocoin is not currently compatible with Bitcoin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mustafa Al-Bassam</span>

Mustafa Al-Bassam is a British computer security researcher, hacker, and co-founder of Celestia Labs. Al-Bassam co-founded the hacker group LulzSec in 2011, which was responsible for several high profile breaches. He later went on to co-found Chainspace, a company implementing a smart contract platform, which was acquired by Facebook in 2019. In 2021, Al-Bassam graduated from University College London, completing a PhD in computer science with a thesis on Securely Scaling Blockchain Base Layers. In 2016, Forbes listed Al-Bassam as one of the 30 Under 30 entrepreneurs in technology.

A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data. Since each block contains information about the previous block, they effectively form a chain, with each additional block linking to the ones before it. Consequently, blockchain transactions are irreversible in that, once they are recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks.

Monero is a cryptocurrency which uses a blockchain with privacy-enhancing technologies to obfuscate transactions to achieve anonymity and fungibility. Observers cannot decipher addresses trading Monero, transaction amounts, address balances, or transaction histories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Dingledine</span> American computer scientist

Roger Dingledine is an American computer scientist known for having co-founded the Tor Project. A student of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering, Dingledine is also known by the pseudonym arma. As of December 2016, he continues in a leadership role with the Tor Project, as a project Leader, Director, and Research Director. His father, Raymond Dingledine, is a professor in Emory School of Medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zcash</span> Cryptocurrency aimed at privacy

Zcash is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency which is based on Bitcoin's codebase. It shares many similarities, such as a fixed total supply of 21 million units.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Firo (cryptocurrency)</span> Cryptocurrency

Firo, formerly known as Zcoin, is a cryptocurrency aimed at using cryptography to provide better privacy for its users compared to other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yuval Elovici</span>

Yuval Elovici is a computer scientist. He is a professor in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), where he is the incumbent of the Davide and Irene Sala Chair in Homeland Security Research. He is the director of the Cyber Security Research Center at BGU and the founder and director of the Telekom Innovation Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University. In addition to his roles at BGU, he also serves as the lab director of Singapore University of Technology and Design’s (SUTD) ST Electronics-SUTD Cyber Security Laboratory, as well as the research director of iTrust. In 2014 he co-founded Morphisec, a start-up company, that develops cyber security mechanisms related to moving target defense.

A wireless onion router is a router that uses Tor to connect securely to a network. The onion router allows the user to connect to the internet anonymously creating an anonymous connection. Tor works using an overlaid network which is free throughout the world, this overlay network is created by using numerous relay points created using volunteer which helps the user hide personal information behind layers of encrypted data like layers of an onion. Routers are being created using Raspberry Pi adding a wireless module or using its own inbuilt wireless module in the later versions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Verge (cryptocurrency)</span> Cryptocurrency

Verge Currency is a decentralized open-source cryptocurrency which offers various levels of private transactions. It does this by obfuscating the IP addresses of users with Tor and by leveraging stealth transactions making it difficult to determine the geolocation of its users.

Nano is a cryptocurrency characterized by a directed acyclic graph data structure and distributed ledger, making it possible for Nano to work without intermediaries. To agree on what transactions to commit, it uses a voting system with weight based on the amount of currency an account holds.

Algorand is a cryptocurrency protocol providing proof-of-stake on a blockchain. Algorand's native cryptocurrency is called ALGO.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "George Danezis | University College London - Academia.edu". ucl.academia.edu. Retrieved 2019-01-27.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "George Danezis". The Alan Turing Institute. Retrieved 2019-01-27.
  3. 1 2 "George Danezis - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2019-01-27.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Field, Matthew (2019-06-26). "The tiny UK start-up founded by UCL scientists now at the heart of Facebook's Libra currency". The Telegraph. ISSN   0307-1235 . Retrieved 2019-07-21.
  5. ↑ Cellan-Jones, Rory (2014-10-29). "A day without data" . Retrieved 2019-07-21.
  6. 1 2 "George Danezis: Executive Profile & Biography - Bloomberg". www.bloomberg.com. Retrieved 2019-01-30.
  7. ↑ "Iris View Profile". iris.ucl.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-01-27.
  8. 1 2 3 Volpicelli, Gian (2019-06-20). "The obscure London startup that made Facebook's Libra possible". Wired UK. ISSN   1357-0978 . Retrieved 2019-07-21.
  9. 1 2 Schroeder, Stan (5 February 2019). "Facebook acquires team behind blockchain startup Chainspace". Mashable. Retrieved 2019-07-21.
  10. 1 2 "Facebook Makes First Blockchain Acquisition With Chainspace: Sources". Cheddar (TV channel) . 2019-02-04. Retrieved 2019-02-05.
  11. ↑ Rodriguez, Salvador (6 December 2021). "Ex-Facebook crypto engineers raise $36 million from Andreessen Horowitz for Mysten Labs" . Retrieved 16 April 2023.
  12. ↑ "Dr George Danezis - Networks of evidence and expertise for public policy". www.csap.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-01-27.
  13. ↑ Murdoch, Steven J.; Danezis, George (2005). "Low-Cost Traffic Analysis of Tor". 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'05). SP '05. Washington, DC, USA: IEEE Computer Society. pp. 183–195. doi:10.1109/SP.2005.12. ISBN   9780769523392. S2CID   14029551.
  14. ↑ Gallagher, Sean (2011-10-28). "Tor Project patches critical flaw in its anonymizing network". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2019-07-21.
  15. ↑ Perrig, Adrian; Danezis, George; Barrera, David; Asoni, Daniele Enrico; Chen, Chen (2015-07-21). "HORNET: High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer". arXiv: 1507.05724v3 [cs.CR].
  16. ↑ Pauli, Darren (2015-07-24). "Boffins sting spooks with 'HORNET' onion router". www.theregister.co.uk. Retrieved 2019-01-27.
  17. ↑ Chavez, Ronald (27 July 2015). "Hornet browser promises to be more private, faster than Tor". Mashable. Retrieved 2019-07-21.
  18. ↑ Danezis, George; Meiser, Sebastian; Elahi, Tariq; Hayes, Jamie; Piotrowska, Ania M. (2017). The Loopix Anonymity System. pp. 1199–1216. arXiv: 1703.00536 . Bibcode:2017arXiv170300536P. ISBN   9781931971409.
  19. ↑ Danezis, George; Goldberg, Ian (2009). "Sphinx: A Compact and Provably Secure Mix Format". 2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. SP '09. Washington, DC, USA: IEEE Computer Society. pp. 269–282. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.1031.7608 . doi:10.1109/SP.2009.15. ISBN   9780769536330. S2CID   2616657.
  20. ↑ Gallagher, Sean (2015-07-24). "Researchers claim they've developed a better, faster Tor". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2019-07-21.
  21. ↑ Simonite, Tom. "A Bitcoin-style currency for central banks". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2019-07-21.
  22. ↑ Mendick, Robert (2017-12-30). "Bank of England plots its own bitcoin-style digital currency". The Telegraph. ISSN   0307-1235 . Retrieved 2019-07-21.
  23. ↑ Al-Bassam, Mustafa; Sonnino, Alberto; Bano, Shehar; Hrycyszyn, Dave; Danezis, George (2017-08-12). "Chainspace: A Sharded Smart Contracts Platform". arXiv: 1708.03778 [cs.CR].
  24. ↑ "Fellowship (FBCS) | Choose your membership | Membership | BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT". www.bcs.org. Retrieved 2019-01-28.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.