It takes quite a bit of institutional commitment and vision to build a strong computer security group. For this reason I am delighted to share here that UCL computer science has in 2014 hired three amazing new faculty members into the Information Security group, bringing the total to nine. Here is the line-up of the UCL Information Security group and teaching the MSc in Information Security:
- Prof. M. Angela Sasse is the head of the Information Security Group and a world expert on usable security and privacy. Her research touches upon the intersection of security mechanisms or security policies and humans — mental models they have, the mistakes they make, and their accurate or false perceptions that lead to security systems working or failing.
- Dr Jens Groth is a cryptographer renowned for his work on novel zero-knowledge proof systems (affectionately known as Groth-Sahai), robust mix systems for anonymous communications and electronic voting and succinct proofs of knowledge. These are crucial building blocks of modern privacy-friendly authentication and private computation protocols.
- Dr Nicolas Courtois is a symmetric key cryptographer, known for pioneering work on algebraic cryptanalysis, extraordinary hacker of real-world cryptographic embedded systems, who has recently developed a keen interest in digital distributed currencies such as Bitcoin.
- Prof. David Pym is both an expert on logic and verification, and also applies methods from economics to understand complex security systems and the decision making in organizations that deploy them. He uses stochastic processes, modeling and utility theory to understand the macro-economics of information security.
- Dr Emiliano de Cristofaro researches privacy and applied cryptography. He has worked on very fast secure set intersection protocols, that are key ingredients of privacy technologies, and is one of the leading experts on protocols for privacy friendly genomics.
- Dr George Danezis (me) researches privacy technologies, anonymous communications, traffic analysis, peer-to-peer security and smart metering security. I have lately developed an interest in applying machine learning techniques to problems in security such as anomaly detection and malware analysis.
- Dr Steven Murdoch (new!) is an world expert on anonymous communications, through his association with the Tor project, banking security and designer of fielded banking authentication mechanisms. He is a media darling when it comes to explaining the problems of real-world deployed cryptographic systems in banking.
- Dr Gianluca Stringhini (new!) is a rising star in network security, with a focus on the technical aspects of cyber-crime and cyber-criminal operations. He studies honest and malicious uses of major online services, such as social networks, email services and blogs, and develops techniques to detect and suppress malicious behavior.
- Dr Sarah Meiklejohn (new!) has an amazing dual expertise in theoretical cryptography on the one hand, and digital currencies and security measurements on the other. She has developed techniques to trace stolen bitcoins, built cryptographic compilers, and contributed to fundamental advances in cryptography such as malleable proof systems.
One key difficulty when building a security group is balancing cohesion, to achieve critical mass, with diversity to cover a broad range of areas and ensuring wide expertise to benefit our students and research. I updated an interactive graph illustrating the structure of collaborations amongst the members of the Information Security Group, as well as their joint collaborators and publication venues. It is clear that all nine faculty members both share enough interest, and are complementary enough, to support each other.
Besides the nine full-time faculty members with a core focus on security, a number of other excellent colleagues at UCL have a track record of contributions in security, supporting teaching and research. Here is just a handful:
- Prof. Brad Karp is an expert in networking and systems and has made seminal contributions to automatic worm detection and containment.
- Dr David Clark specializes in software engineering with a core interest in information flow techniques for confidentiality, software security and lately malware.
- Dr Earl Barr researches software engineering, and has researched security bugs, and malware as well as ideas for simple key management.
- Prof. Ingemar Cox (part-time at UCL) is a world expert in multimedia security, watermarking and information hiding.
- Prof. Yvo Desmedt (part-time at UCL) is a renowned cryptographer with key contributions in group key exchange, zero-knowledge and all fields of symmetric and asymmetric cryptography.
The full list of other colleagues working in security, including visiting researchers, post-doctoral researchers and research students list many more people – making UCL one of the largest research groups in Information Security in Europe.
This post originally appeared on Conspicuous Chatter, the blog of George Danezis.