George Danezis

George Danezis
University College London | UCL · Department of Computer Science

PhD in Computer Security, University of Cambridge

About

175
Publications
67,194
Reads
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10,557
Citations
Introduction
George Danezis is a Reader in Security and Privacy Engineering at University College London. He has been working on anonymous communications, privacy enhancing technologies (PET), and traffic analysis since 2000. He has previously been a researcher at Microsfot Research Cambridge (UK, visiting fellow at K.U.Leuven (Belgium) and a research associate at the University of Cambridge (UK), where he also completed his doctoral dissertation in 2004 under the supervision of Prof. R.J. Anderson.
Additional affiliations
September 2013 - present
University College London
Position
  • Reader in Security and Privacy Engineering
September 2005 - September 2007
KU Leuven
Position
  • Researcher
September 2004 - August 2005
University of Cambridge
Position
  • Research Associate

Publications

Publications (175)
Preprint
Block-STM is a parallel execution engine for smart contracts, built around the principles of Software Transactional Memory. Transactions are grouped in blocks, and every execution of the block must yield the same deterministic outcome. Block-STM further enforces that the outcome is consistent with executing transactions according to a preset order,...
Preprint
We introduce Zef, the first Byzantine-Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocol to support payments in anonymous digital coins at arbitrary scale. Zef follows the communication and security model of FastPay: both protocols are asynchronous, low-latency, linearly-scalable, and powered by partially-trusted sharded authorities. In contrast with FastPay, user acco...
Conference Paper
This work formalizes the structure and protocols underlying recent distributed systems leveraging block DAGs, which are essentially encoding Lamport's happened-before relations between blocks, as their core network primitives. We then present an embedding of any deterministic Byzantine fault tolerant protocol ℘ to employ a block DAG for interpretin...
Preprint
Full-text available
We propose separating the task of transaction dissemination from transaction ordering, to enable high-performance Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus in a permissioned setting. To this end, we design and evaluate a mempool protocol, Narwhal, specializing in high-throughput reliable dissemination and storage of causal histories of transactions. Narwh...
Preprint
Full-text available
This work formalizes the structure and protocols underlying recent distributed systems leveraging block DAGs, which are essentially encoding Lamport's happened-before relations between blocks, as their core network primitives. We then present an embedding of any deterministic Byzantine fault tolerant protocol $\mathcal{P}$ to employ a block DAG for...
Conference Paper
We present a family of replay attacks against sharded distributed ledgers targeting cross-shard consensus protocols, such as the recently proposed Chainspace and Omniledger. They allow an attacker, with network access only, to double-spend or lock resources with minimal efforts. The attacker can act independently without colluding with any nodes, a...
Preprint
FastPay allows a set of distributed authorities, some of which are Byzantine, to maintain a high-integrity and availability settlement system for pre-funded payments. It can be used to settle payments in a native unit of value (crypto-currency), or as a financial side-infrastructure to support retail payments in fiat currencies. FastPay is based on...
Conference Paper
The core technical component of blockchains is consensus: how to reach agreement among a distributed network of nodes. A plethora of blockchain consensus protocols have been proposed---ranging from new designs, to novel modifications and extensions of consensus protocols from the classical distributed systems literature. The inherent complexity of...
Preprint
The Sybil attack plagues all peer-to-peer systems, and modern open distributed ledgers employ a number of tactics to prevent it from proof of work, or other resources such as space, stake or memory, to traditional admission control in permissioned settings. With SybilQuorum we propose an alternative approach to securing an open distributed ledger a...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Mix networks are a key technology to achieve network anonymity and private messaging, voting and database lookups. However, simple mix network designs are vulnerable to malicious mixes, which may drop or delay packets to facilitate traffic analysis attacks. Mix networks with prov-able robustness address this drawback through complex and expensive p...
Preprint
We present the first replay attacks against sharded distributed ledgers. These attacks target cross-shard consensus protocols allowing an attacker to double-spend or lock resources with minimal efforts. The attacker can act independently without colluding with any nodes, and succeed even if all nodes are honest; most of the attacks also work under...
Article
Full-text available
Generative models estimate the underlying distribution of a dataset to generate realistic samples according to that distribution. In this paper, we present the first membership inference attacks against generative models: given a data point, the adversary determines whether or not it was used to train the model. Our attacks leverage Generative Adve...
Conference Paper
Generative models estimate the underlying distribution of a dataset to generate realistic samples according to that distribution. In this paper, we present the first membership inference attacks against generative models: given a data point, the adversary determines whether or not it was used to train the model. Our attacks leverage Generative Adve...
Conference Paper
The social demand for email end-to-end encryption is barely supported by mainstream service providers. Autocrypt is a new community-driven open specification for e-mail encryption that attempts to respond to this demand. In Autocrypt the encryption keys are attached directly to messages, and thus the encryption can be implemented by email clients w...
Preprint
Full-text available
Mix networks are a key technology to achieve network anonymity, private messaging, voting and database lookups. However, simple mix networks are vulnerable to malicious mixes, which may drop or delay packets to facilitate traffic analysis attacks. Mix networks with provable robustness address this drawback through complex and expensive proofs of co...
Conference Paper
Neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, inputs that have been intentionally perturbed to remain visually similar to the source input, but cause a misclassification. It was recently shown that given a dataset and classifier, there exists so called universal adversarial perturbations, a single perturbation that causes a mi...
Conference Paper
Modern low-latency anonymity systems, no matter whether constructed as an overlay or implemented at the network layer, offer limited security guarantees against traffic analysis. On the other hand, high-latency anonymity systems offer strong security guarantees at the cost of computational overhead and long delays, which are excessive for interacti...
Article
Modern low-latency anonymity systems, no matter whether constructed as an overlay or implemented at the network layer, offer limited security guarantees against traffic analysis. On the other hand, high-latency anonymity systems offer strong security guarantees at the cost of computational overhead and long delays, which are excessive for interacti...
Conference Paper
We present Coconut, a novel selective disclosure credential scheme supporting distributed threshold issuance, public and private attributes, re-randomization, and multiple unlinkable selective attribute revelations. Coconut can be used by modern blockchains to ensure confidentiality, authenticity and availability even when a subset of credential is...
Article
Full-text available
Privacy-preserving billing protocols are useful in settings where a meter measures user consumption of some service, such as smart metering of utility consumption, pay-as-you-drive insurance and electronic toll collection. In such settings, service providers apply fine-grained tariff policies that require meters to provide a detailed account of use...
Preprint
The blockchain initially gained traction in 2008 as the technology underlying bitcoin, but now has been employed in a diverse range of applications and created a global market worth over $150B as of 2017. What distinguishes blockchains from traditional distributed databases is the ability to operate in a decentralized setting without relying on a t...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
AnNotify is a scalable service for private, timely and low-cost on-line notifications, based on anonymous communication, sharding, dummy queries, and Bloom filters. We present the design and analysis of AnNotify, as well as an evaluation of its costs. We outline the design of AnNotify and calculate the concrete advantage of an adversary observing m...
Conference Paper
Oblivious RAM (ORAM) is a key technology for providing private storage and querying on untrusted machines but is commonly seen as impractical due to the high and recurring overhead of the re-randomization, called the eviction, the client incurs. We propose in this work to securely delegate the eviction to semi-trusted third parties to enable any cl...
Article
Full-text available
Oblivious RAM (ORAM) is a key technology for providing private storage and querying on untrusted machines but is commonly seen as impractical due to the high overhead of the re-randomization, called the eviction, the client incurs. We propose in this work to securely delegate the eviction to semi-trusted third parties to enable any client to accede...
Article
Neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, inputs that have been intentionally perturbed to remain visually similar to the source input, but cause a misclassification. Until now, black-box attacks against neural networks have relied on transferability of adversarial examples. White-box attacks are used to generate adversari...
Preprint
Full-text available
Chainspace is a decentralized infrastructure, known as a distributed ledger, that supports user defined smart contracts and executes user-supplied transactions on their objects. The correct execution of smart contract transactions is verifiable by all. The system is scalable, by sharding state and the execution of transactions, and using S-BAC, a d...
Article
Full-text available
We envision a decentralized Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) design, that we call ClaimChain, where each user or device maintains repositories of claims regarding their own key material, and their beliefs about public keys and, generally, state of other users of the system. High integrity of the repositories is maintained by virtue of storing claims...
Article
Full-text available
Recent advances in machine learning are paving the way for the artificial generation of high quality images and videos. In this paper, we investigate how generating synthetic samples through generative models can lead to information leakage, and, consequently, to privacy breaches affecting individuals' privacy that contribute their personal or sens...
Article
Full-text available
Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially adversarial. We revise fifteen years of research on decentralization and privacy, and provide an overview of key systems....
Article
Adversarial training was recently shown to be competitive against supervised learning methods on computer vision tasks, however, studies have mainly been confined to generative tasks such as image synthesis. In this paper, we apply adversarial training techniques to the discriminative task of learning a steganographic algorithm. Steganography is a...
Article
Full-text available
We present Loopix, a low-latency anonymous communication system that provides bi-directional 'third-party' sender and receiver anonymity and unobservability. Loopix leverages cover traffic and brief message delays to provide anonymity and achieve traffic analysis resistance, including against a global network adversary. Mixes and clients self-monit...
Article
Full-text available
The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) (in the United States) has published on October 19, 2015, a white paper on "privacy-enhanced identity brokers." We present here a reply to their request for public comments. We enumerate concerns whose consideration we find paramount for the design of a privacy-enhancing identity brokering sol...
Conference Paper
Anonymous communication systems are vulnerable to long term passive "intersection attacks". Not all users of an anonymous communication system will be online at the same time, this leaks some information about who is talking to who. A global passive adversary observing all communications can learn the set of potential recipients of a message with m...
Conference Paper
UnlimitID is a method for enhancing the privacy of commodity OAuth and applications such as OpenID Connect, using anonymous attribute-based credentials based on algebraic Message Authentication Codes (aMACs). OAuth is one of the most widely used protocols on the Web, but it exposes each of the requests of a user for data by each relying party (RP)...
Technical Report
Full-text available
AnoNotify is a service for private, timely and low-cost on-line notifications. We present the design and security arguments behind AnoNotify, as well as an evaluation of its cost. AnoNotify is based on mix-networks, Bloom filters and shards. We present a security definition and security proofs for AnoNotify. We then discuss a number of applications...
Article
Full-text available
Private Information Retrieval (PIR), despite being well studied, is computationally costly and arduous to scale. We explore lower-cost relaxations of information-theoretic PIR, based on dummy queries, sparse vectors, and compositions with an anonymity system. We prove the security of each scheme using a flexible differentially private definition fo...
Conference Paper
Large-scale collection of contextual information is often essential in order to gather statistics, train machine learning models, and extract knowledge from data. The ability to do so in a privacy-preserving way – i.e., without collecting finegrained user data – enables a number of additional computational scenarios that would be hard, or outright...
Conference Paper
Current cryptocurrencies, starting with Bitcoin, build a decentralized blockchain-based transaction ledger, maintained through proofs-of-work that also serve to generate a monetary supply. Such decentralization has benefits, such as independence from national political control, but also significant limitations in terms of computational costs and sc...
Conference Paper
We present HORNET, a system that enables high-speed end-to-end anonymous channels by leveraging next-generation network architectures. HORNET is designed as a low-latency onion routing system that operates at the network layer thus enabling a wide range of applications. Our system uses only symmetric cryptography for data forwarding yet requires no...
Article
Full-text available
Website fingerprinting enables an attacker to infer the source of a web page when a client is browsing through encrypted or anonymized network connections. We present a new website fingerprinting attack based on fingerprints extracted from random decision forests. Within the context of this attack we provide an analysis of the utility of previously...
Article
Full-text available
In our digital society, the large-scale collection of contextual information is often essential to gather statistics, train machine learning models, and extract knowledge from data. The ability to do so in a privacy-preserving way -- i.e., without collecting fine-grained user data -- enables a number of computational scenarios that would be hard, o...
Article
Full-text available
We present HORNET, a system that enables high-speed end-to-end anonymous channels by leveraging next generation network architectures. HORNET is designed as a low-latency onion routing system that operates at the network layer thus enabling a wide range of applications. Our system uses only symmetric cryptography for data forwarding yet requires no...
Article
Full-text available
Available online public/governmental services requiring authentication by citizens have considerably expanded in recent years. This has hindered the usability and security associated with credential management by users and service providers. To address the problem, some countries have proposed nation-scale identification/authentication systems that...
Article
Full-text available
“Entry” guards protect the Tor onion routing system from variants of the “predecessor” attack, that would allow an adversary with control of a fraction of routers to eventually de-anonymize some users. Research has however shown the three guard scheme has drawbacks and Dingledine et al. proposed in 2014 for each user to have a single long-term guar...
Article
Full-text available
Users of social applications like to be notified when their friends are online. Typically, this is done by a central server keeping track of who is online and offline, as well as of all of the users’ “buddy lists”, which contain sensitive information. We present DP5, a cryptographic service that implements online presence indication in a privacy-fr...
Article
Full-text available
Current cryptocurrencies, starting with Bitcoin, build a decentralized blockchain-based transaction ledger, maintained through proofs-of-work that also generate a monetary supply. Such decentralization has benefits, such as independence from national political control, but also significant limitations in terms of scalability and computational cost....
Article
Full-text available
This work focuses on a specific front of the malware detection arms-race, namely the detection of persistent, disk-resident malware. We exploit normalised compression distance (NCD), an information theoretic measure, applied directly to binaries. Given a zoo of labelled malware and benign-ware, we ask whether a suspect program is more similar to ou...
Conference Paper
We propose a new characterization of NP using square span programs (SSPs). We first characterize NP as affine map constraints on small vectors. We then relate this characterization to SSPs, which are similar but simpler than Quadratic Span Programs (QSPs) and Quadratic Arithmetic Programs (QAPs) since they use a single series of polynomials rather...
Book
Full-text available
Privacy and data protection constitute core values of individuals and of democratic societies. There have been decades of debate on how those values -and legal obligations- can be embedded into systems, preferably from the very beginning of the design process. One important element in this endeavour are technical mechanisms, known as privacy-enhanc...
Conference Paper
Advances in DNA sequencing are bringing mass computational genomic testing increasingly closer to reality. The sensitivity of genetic data, however, prompts the need for carefully protecting patients' privacy. Also, it is crucial to conceal the test's specifics, which often constitute a pharmaceutical company's trade secret. This paper presents two...
Article
In addition to their common use for private online communication, anonymous communication networks can also be used to circumvent censorship. However, it is difficult to determine the extent to which they are actually used for this purpose without violating the privacy of the networks' users. Knowing this extent can be useful to designers and resea...
Article
It is of significant biophysical interest to obtain accurate intramolecular distance information and population sizes from single-molecule Forster resonance energy transfer (smFRET) data obtained from biomolecules in solution. Experimental methods of increasing cost and complexity are being developed to improve the accuracy and precision of data co...
Article
Full-text available
We present a generic and automated approach to re-identifying nodes in anonymized social networks which enables novel anonymization techniques to be quickly evaluated. It uses machine learning (decision forests) to matching pairs of nodes in disparate anonymized sub-graphs. The technique uncovers artefacts and invariants of any black-box anonymizat...
Patent
Sharing of user preferences is described. In an embodiment a user preference associated with a user is shared with a group of users in order to improve the relevance of results they receive. A database is used to store information detailing a number of groups of users extracted from a social network graph, where the social network graph describes c...
Patent
Full-text available
Privacy-preserving metering with low overhead is described. In an embodiment consumption of a resource such as electricity, car insurance, cloud computing resources is monitored by a meter and bills are created in a manner which preserves privacy of a customer but at the same reduces bandwidth use between a meter and a provider of the resource. For...
Conference Paper
We design and prototype protocols for processing smart-meter readings while preserving user privacy. We provide support for computing non-linear functions on encrypted readings, implemented by adapting to our setting efficient secret-sharing-based secure multi-party computation techniques. Meter readings are jointly processed by a (public) storage...
Conference Paper
Bitcoin is the first widely adopted distributed e-cash system and Zerocoin is a recent proposal to extend Bitcoin with anonymous transactions. The original Zerocoin protocol relies heavily on the Strong RSA assumption and double-discrete logarithm proofs, long-standing techniques with known performance restrictions. We show a variant of the Zerocoi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Disclosure attacks against anonymization systems have traditionally assumed that users exhibit stable patterns of communications in the long term. We use datasets of real traffic to show that this assumption does not hold: usage patterns email, mailing lists, and location-based services are dynamic in nature. We introduce the sequential statistical...
Conference Paper
ZQL is a query language for expressing simple computations on private data. Its compiler produces code to certify data, perform client-side computations, and verify the correctness of their results. Under the hood, it synthesizes zero-knowledge protocols that guarantee both integrity of the query results and privacy for all other data. We present t...
Conference Paper
EasyCrypt is a tool-assisted framework for reasoning about probabilistic computations in the presence of adversarial code, whose main application has been the verification of security properties of cryptographic constructions in the computational model. We report on a significantly enhanced version of EasyCrypt that accommodates a richer, user-exte...
Article
Forster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) is a powerful technique for studying the conformational dynamics of biological systems at the level of single molecules. FRET experiments on single molecules (smFRET) in solution have the potential to recover accurate intramolecular distances. However, established methods for event selection and de-noising o...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Good afternoon everybody! It feels like today there hasn’t been a lot of controversy that would interrupt the talks in the first five minutes, so I thought that I should inject a bit more. So I will make slightly more extreme comments about everything I’m going to be talking about than I intended to, just to inject a bit of energy in the room at th...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Nowadays, service providers gather fine-grained data about users to deliver personalized services, for example, through the use of third-party cookies or social network profiles. This poses a threat both to privacy, since the amount of information obtained is excessive for the purpose of customization, and authenticity, because those methods employ...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We present traffic analyses of two anonymous communications schemes that build on the classic Crowds/Hordes protocols. The AJSS10 [1] scheme combines multiple Crowds-like forward channels with a Hordes reply channel in an attempt to offer robustness in a mobile environment. We show that the resulting scheme fails to guarantee the claimed k-anonymit...
Article
Ken Thompson was the 1984 recipient of the Turing Award, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Computer Science. His recognized contributions include the design, while at Bell Labs, of the UNIX operating system, that later led to the free software flagship Linux, and today Android, which has the largest share of the smartphone market. Yet, in his ac...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Privacy is considered one of the key challenges when moving services to the Cloud. Solution like access control are brittle, while fully homomorphic encryption that is hailed as the silver bullet for this problem is far from practical. But would fully homomorphic encryption really be such an effective solution to the privacy problem? And can we alr...
Article
Full-text available
Current smart grid proposals threaten users' privacy by disclosing fine-grained consumption data to util-ity providers, primarily for billing. We propose a privacy-preserving protocol for billing and for performing general calculations on fine grained meter readings. Our protocol combines a signed tariff policy from the utility with signed readings...
Article
Full-text available
Pay-As-You-Drive insurance schemes are establishing themselves as the future of car insurance. However, their current implementations, in which fine-grained location data are sent to insurers, entail a serious privacy risk. We present PriPAYD, a system where the premium calculations are performed locally in the vehicle, and only aggregated data are...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Mobile users expose their location to potentially untrusted entities by using location-based services. Based on the frequency of location exposure in these applications, we divide them into two main types: Continuous and Sporadic. These two location exposure types lead to different threats. For example, in the continuous case, the adversary can tra...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The widespread deployment of smart meters for the modernisation of the electricity distribution network, but also for gas and water consumption, has been associated with privacy concerns due to the potentially large number of measurements that reflect the consumers behaviour. In this paper, we present protocols that can be used to privately compute...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We review the current strategies to counter Internet threats under the light of the classic strategy literature. The literature often advocates proactive action, and dominance of the (virtual, in our case) battlefield, which is the opposite from what we see defenders deploy today. Their actions are instead reactive and exclusively defensive. We pro...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We show that Alice and Bob can communicate covertly and anonymously, despite Eve having access to the traffic data of most machines on the Internet. Our protocols take advantage of small amounts of shared state that exist in many TCP/IP stacks, and use them to construct a covert channel. Techniques inspired from Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSS...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A number of established and novel business models are based on fine grained billing, including pay-per-view, mobile messaging, voice calls, pay-as-you-drive insurance, smart metering for utility provision, private computing clouds and hosted services. These models apply fine-grained tariffs dependent on time-of-use or place of-use to readings to co...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Smart meters that track fine-grained electricity usage and implement sophisticated usage-based billing policies, e.g., based on timeof-use, are a key component of recent smart grid initiatives that aim to increase the electric grid’s efficiency. A key impediment to widespread smart meter deployment is that fine-grained usage data indirectly reveals...
Article
Full-text available
Mobile users expose their location to potentially untrusted entities by using location-based services. Based on the frequency of location exposure in these applications, we divide them into two main types: Continuous and Sporadic. These two location exposure types lead to different threats. For example, in the continuous case, the adversary can tra...
Article
Full-text available
This paper is still being revised. It will eventually appear in the proceedings of the 2010 surveillance studies conference. It can then be cited as follows: George Danezis and Seda Gürses, A critical review of 10 years of Privacy Technology, In the Proceedings of Surveillance Cultures: A Global Surveillance Society?, April 2010, UK. Since 2000 the...