George Danezis

George Danezis
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 44)
NationalityGreek and French[3]
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisBetter Anonymous Communications (2004)
Doctoral advisorRoss Anderson
Websitehttp://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/g.danezis/

George Danezis, FBCS[1] (born 6 December 1979)[3] 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.[1][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.

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][1][3][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.[2]

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,[1] an award given to those who "demonstrate a commitment to advancing standards; strategic leadership and best practice, and encourage this in others".[24]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e "George Danezis". The Alan Turing Institute. Retrieved 2019-01-27.
  2. ^ a b "George Danezis - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2019-01-27.
  3. ^ a b c "George Danezis | University College London - Academia.edu". ucl.academia.edu. Retrieved 2019-01-27.
  4. ^ a b c d 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. ^ a b "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. ^ a b c 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. ^ a b Schroeder, Stan (5 February 2019). "Facebook acquires team behind blockchain startup Chainspace". Mashable. Retrieved 2019-07-21.
  10. ^ a b "Facebook Makes First Blockchain Acquisition With Chainspace: Sources". Cheddar (TV channel). 2019-02-04. Archived from the original on 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.