Some may have noticed I have gone part-time at University College London, and plan to spend the next two years engineering and launching distributed systems as part of the Chainspace project, Vega Protocol and Kryptik. A number of people have asked me “Why would an expert on Privacy Enhancing Technologies develop such an interest in […]| Conspicuous Chatter
I just watched the, as ever provocative, presentation of Paul Syverson at HotPETs 2017, on targeting adversaries against Tor. I will just put down here some thoughts on onion routing, threat models, and security engineering loosely related to the talk. Onion routing, as a concept, has committed an original sin, that has since its inception […]| Conspicuous Chatter
I am at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Minnesota. As it is customary the conversations with other privacy researchers and developers are extremely engaging. One topic I discussed over beer with Mike Perry and Natalie Eskinazi is whether secure group messaging protocols could be simplified by relaxing some of their security and systems assumptions. In […]| Conspicuous Chatter
You know you live in 2017 when the top headline on national newspapers relates to a ransomware attack on the National Heath Service, the UK Prime minister comments on the matter, and the the security researchers dealing with the outbreak are presented as heroic figures. As ever, The Register, has the most detailed and sophisticated […]| Conspicuous Chatter
I am at PETS 2016 writing this summary in real-time as Tao Wang presents his work with Ian Goldberg on “On Realistically Attacking Tor with Website Fingerprinting“. This is the latest paper addressing challenges identified by the Tor project to make website fingerprinting (WF) research more informative about real-world threats. We have a stake in […]| Conspicuous Chatter
I am currently attending the Corfu Bitcoin “school” partly supported by our NEXTLEAP project, and gathering some of my favourite researchers, including Joe Bonneau who just presented a lecture on bitcoin mining. He gave a fantastic overview of the evolution of mining technology, leading to large specialized pools of custom hardware located in jurisdictions with […]| Conspicuous Chatter
One of the rare joys of being a live author, is the ability to interpret your own works, as well as to help others when they try to do so. In that context it was, as ever, a pleasure to read Gürses et al. recent article on “Crypto and empire: the contradictions of counter-surveillance advocacy” and […]| Conspicuous Chatter
Boing Boing just released a classified GCHQ document that was meant to act as the Sept 2011 guide to open research problems in Data Mining. The intended audience, Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research (HIMR), is part of the University of Bristol and composed of mathematicians working for half their time on classified problems with GCHQ. First off, […]| Conspicuous Chatter
(This is an extract from my contribution to Harper, Richard. “Introduction and Overview”, Trust, Computing, and Society. Ed. Richard H. R. Harper. 1st ed. New York: Cambridge University…| Conspicuous Chatter
Wikileaks just published a trove of documents resulting from a hack of the CIA Engineering Development Group, the part of the spying agency that is in charge of developing hacking tools. The docume…| Conspicuous Chatter