July 2025 – Bentham’s Gaze
Information Security Research & Education, University College London (UCL)| Bentham’s Gaze
Information Security Research & Education, University College London (UCL)| Bentham’s Gaze
For years, the world of cryptocurrency has been synonymous with cutting-edge digital security and the constant threat of sophisticated cyberattacks. The community has honed its skills in protecting its assets from malware, fraudsters, and cybercriminals. But what if the biggest threat to your crypto| Bentham’s Gaze
Time-lock puzzles allow a message to be locked today and only revealed after a certain amount of time has passed. This idea has wide-reaching applications, from delayed cryptocurrency payments and sealed-bid auctions to time-based access control and zero-knowledge proofs. In our latest work, we| Bentham’s Gaze
On Monday, the final judgement in the Post Office trial was handed down, finding in favour of the claimants on all counts. The outcome will be of particular interest to the group of 587 claimants who brought the case against Post Office Limited, but the judgement also illustrates problems handling e| Bentham’s Gaze
In London, this week, a trial is being held over a dispute between the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) and the Post Office, but the result will have far-reaching repercussions for anyone disputing computer evidence. The trial currently focuses on whether the legal agreements and processes| Bentham’s Gaze
Information Security Research & Education, University College London (UCL)| Bentham’s Gaze
Social media data enables researchers to understand current events and human behavior with unprecedented ease and scale. Yet, researchers often violate user privacy when they access, process, and store sensitive information contained within social media data. Social media has proved largely benef| Bentham’s Gaze
On Friday, 39 subpostmasters had their criminal convictions overturned by the Court of Appeal. These individuals ran post office branches and were prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting based on evidence from Horizon, the Post Office computer system created by Fujitsu. Horizon’s evidence w| Bentham’s Gaze
This post introduces the problem of backdoors embedded in deep reinforcement learning agents and discusses our proposed defence. For more technical details please see our paper and the project's repo. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has the potential to be a game-changer in process automation.| Bentham’s Gaze
In the dynamic world of blockchain technology, a Research Note from authors at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and University College London (UCL) delves into the complex territories of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) and blockchain oracles, presenting a nuanced study that underscores both the| Bentham’s Gaze
In general, the broad aim of regulation is to organise the relationship between persons and to protect their rights and interests in society. However as we have discovered, this has not been the case within the cryptocurrency space. It has been almost 15 years since Satoshi Nakamoto published the| Bentham’s Gaze
A rising category of cryptocurrency scams called 'rugpulls' accounted for 37% of all cryptocurrency scam revenue in 2021. A rugpull is an exit scam in the DeFi (Decentralized Finance) ecosystem where developers abandon a project without fully delivering and run away with investors' funds. Thodex, a| Bentham’s Gaze
In October last year, analysts at Cyble published an article on the return of the Drinik malware that was first spotted by CERT-In in 2016. Last month during the tax-paying season of the year, I (Sharad Agarwal), a Ph.D. student at University College London (UCL) researching SMS phishing, found and| Bentham’s Gaze
Acropalypse is a vulnerability first identified in the Google Pixel phone screenshot tool, where after cropping an image, the original would be recoverable. Since the part of the image cropped out might contain sensitive information, this was a serious security issue. The problem occurred because th| Bentham’s Gaze
In the umpteenth chapter of UK governments battling encryption, Priti Patel in September 2021 launched the “Safety Tech Challenge”. It was to give five companies £85K each to develop “innovative technologies to keep children safe when using end-to-end encrypted messaging services”. Tasked with evalu| Bentham’s Gaze
In this briefing note, we discuss the legal presumption that computers are operating correctly - a topic previously covered on Bentham's Gaze, particularly in relation to the Post Office Horizon Scandal but that is also relevant to other areas like payment disputes. The briefing note is also availab| Bentham’s Gaze
