George Danezis Old photos: [1, 2, 3]

Myself

I am a full time researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. My key interests relate to the areas of computer security, privacy, and in particular anonymous communications, traffic analysis, statistical inference, and peer-to-peer security. You can find more information about my work on the MSRC Security group pages and in particular the section on privacy research. My close colleagues here are Cedric Fournet, Markulf Kohlweiss, Andy Gordon and Moritz Becker. My full CV as well as a short presentation of my work are also available.

Between 2005 and 2007 I was a post-doctoral visiting fellow at Prof. Bart Preneel's COSIC group at K.U.Leuven, Belgium. With Claudia Diaz we were coordinating the COSIC Privacy Group. Until 2005 I have been a research assistant in the Security Group, of the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, working on anonymous communications, peer-to-peer networks and censorship resistance. I also got my Ph.D, M.A. and B.A at the Cambridge University, Computer Laboratory under the supervision of Prof. Ross J. Anderson.

Pointers

• Conspicuous Chatter is my new blog, where I discuss issue related to anonymous communications and traffic analysis. My notes on academic work I read are also there, along with previews of my own work.
• Visit the smart metering privacy project page.

Publications

See also DBLP and Microsoft Academic.

• George Danezis, Markulf Kohlweiss, Benjamin Livshits, Alfredo Rial. Private Client-Side Profiling with Random Forests and Hidden Markov Models. Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2012, Vigo Spain.
• George Danezis and Emilia Kasper.The Dangers of Composing Anonymity Channels. 14th Information Hiding Conference, Berkeley, California.
• Andres Molina-Markham, George Danezis, Kevin Fu, Prashant Shenoy and David Irwin. Designing Privacy-preserving Smart Meters with Low-cost Microcontrollers. Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2012. February 27–March 2, 2012, Divi Flamingo Beach Resort, Bonaire.
• Alfredo Rial and George Danezis. Privacy-Preserving Smart Metering. Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, WPES 2011, Chicago, USA, October 17, 20011.
• George Danezis and Benjamin Livshits. Towards Ensuring Client-Side Computational Integrity (Position Paper). The ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop. CCSW 2011, Chicago, USA, October 17, 20011.
• Klaus Kursawe, George Danezis and Markulf Kohlweiss. Privacy-friendly Aggregation for the Smart-grid. Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2011
• Reza Shokri and George Theodorakopoulos, George Danezis, and Jean-Pierre Hubaux and Jean-Yves Le Boudec. Quantifying Location Privacy: The Case of Sporadic Location Exposure. Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2011
• Markulf Kohlweiss, George Danezis, Alfredo Rial. Differentially Private Billing with Rebates. Information Hiding 2011
• George Danezis, Claudia Diaz, Carmela Troncoso, Ben laurie. Drac: An Architecture for Anonymous Low-Volume Communications. Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET2010)
• George Danezis, Tuomas Aura, Shuo Chen, and Emre Kiciman. How to share your favourite search results while preserving privacy and quality. Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET2010)
• George Danezis. Inferring Privacy policies for Social network Services. AISec 2009, Chicago, USA.
• Carmela Troncoso and George Danezis. The Bayesian Traffic Analysis of Mix networks. ACM CCS 2009, Chicago, USA.
• George Danezis, Claudia Diaz, Emilia Kasper, and Carmela Troncoso. The wisdom of Crowds: attacks and optimal constructions ESORICS 2009, St Malo, France.
• George Danezis and Carmela Troncoso. Vida: How to use Bayesian inference to de-anonymize persistent communications. Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2009), Seattle, USA.
• Joseph Bonneau, Jonathan Anderson and George Danezis. Prying Data out of a Social Network. ASONAM 2009: The 2009 International Conference on Social Network Analysis and Mining, Athens, Greece.
• George Danezis. The least privacy-damaging centralised traffic data retention architecture (Extended abstract). Cambridge Security Protocols Worekshop (SPW 2009), Cambridge, UK.
• George Danezis and Ian Goldberg. Sphinx: A Compact and Provably Secure Mix Format. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2009, Oakland, USA.
• Janne Lindqvist, Tuomas Aura, George Danezis, Teemu Koponen, Annu Myllyniemi, Jussi Mäki and Michael Roe, Privacy-Preserving 802.11 Access-Point Discovery, to appear in Second ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec'09), March 16-18, Zürich, Switzerland.
• George Danezis and Prateek Mittal. SybilInfer: Detecting Sybil Nodes using Social Networks. 16th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2009), San Diego, CA.
• Yoni De Mulder, George Danezis, Lejla Batina and Bart Preneel. Identification via Location-Profiling in GSM Networks. Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2008), Alexandria, Virginia, USA.
• George Danezis and Paul Syverson. Bridging and Fingerprinting: Epistemic Attacks on Route Selection. Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2008), Leuven, Belgium.
• George Danezis and Len Sassaman. How to Bypass Two Anonymity Revocation Schemes. Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2008), Leuven, Belgium.
• George Danezis. Covert Communications Despite Traffic Data Retention. Cambridge Security Protocols Workshop (SPW 2008). Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, UK.
• Daniel Cvrcek and George Danezis. Fighting the Good Internet War. Cambridge Security Protocols Workshop (SPW 2008). Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, UK.
• Nikita Borisov, George Danezis, Prateek Mittal and Parisa Tabriz. Denial of Service or Denial of Security? How Attacks on Reliability can Compromise Anonymity. ACM CCS 2007.
• B. Preneel, C. Troncoso, G. Danezis, and E. Kosta. PriPAYD: Privacy Friendly Pay-As-You-Drive Insurance. In Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society 2007, ACM, 9 pages, 2007.
• C. Diaz, C. Troncoso, and G. Danezis. Does additional information always reduce anonymity?. In Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society 2007, ACM, 4 pages, 2007.
• G. Danezis, C. Diaz, S. Faust, E. Käsper, B. Preneel, and C. Troncoso. Efficient Negative Databases from Cryptographic Hash Functions, In Proceedings of the 10th Information Security Conference (ISC 2007), Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS, J. A. Garay (ed.), Springer-Verlag, 12 pages, 2007.
• George Danezis, Claudia Diaz and Carmela Troncoso. Two-sided Statistical Disclosure Attack. PET 2007, Ottawa, Canada.
• George Danezis and Ben Laurie. Private Yet Abuse Resistant Open Publishing. XVth Security Protocols Workshop. Brno.
• George Danezis and Claudia Diaz. Space-Efficient Private Search with Applications to Rateless Codes . Financial Cryptoraphy 2007.
• Dan Cvrcek, Marek Kumpost, Vashek Matyas and George Danezis. Study on the Price of Privacy. ACM WPES..
• Mike Bond and George Danezis. A Pact with the Devil. New Security Paradigms Workshop 2006, Dagstuhl, Germany.
• George Danezis and Richard Clayton. Route Fingerprinting in Anonymous Communications. 6th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, Cambridge 2006.
• George Danezis. Breaking Four Mix-related Schemes Based on Universal Re-encryption. Information Security Conference 2006.
• George Danezis, Bettina Wittneben. The Economics of Mass Surveillance and the Questionable Value of Anonymous Communications. WEIS 2006.
• Dan Cvrcek, Marek Kumpost, Vashek Matyas and George Danezis. The Value of Location Information: A European-Wide Study. Cambridge Security Protocols Workshop 2006.
• George Danezis, Chris Lesniewski-Laas, M. Frans Kaashoek and Ross Anderson. Sybil-resistant DHT routing. ESORICS 2005.
• George Danezis and Jolyon Clulow. Compulsion Resistant Anonymous Communications. 7th Information Hiding Workshop, Barcelona, Spain.
• George Danezis, Stephen Lewis and Ross Anderson. How Much is Location Privacy Worth?. Fourth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2005). Harvard University, 2 - 3 June 2005.
• Steven J. Murdoch and George Danezis. Low-cost Traffic Analysis of Tor. 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 8-11, 2005, Oakland, California, USA.
• Mike Bond and George Danezis. The Dining Freemasons (Security Protocols for Secret Societies). Thirteenth International Workshop on Security Protocols, Cambridge, England -- 20-22 April 2005.
• George Danezis, Ross Anderson. The economics of resisting censorship, Security & Privacy Magazine, IEEE, Volume: 3, Issue: 1, Year: Jan.-Feb. 2005, Page(s): 45- 50.
• George Danezis and Ben Laurie. Minx: A Simple and Efficient Anonymous Packet Format WPES 2004, Washington DC, October 2004.
• Rainer Bohme, George Danezis, Claudia Diaz, Stefan Kopsell, and Andreas Pfitzmann . Mix Cascades vs. Peer-to-Peer: Is One Concept Superior?, Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop 2004. Toronto.
• George Danezis. The Traffic Analysis of Continuous-Time Mixes. Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop 2004. Toronto. 
• George Danezis, Ross Anderson. The Economics of Censorship Resistance. Worshop on Economics and Information Security.
• George Danezis, Andrei Serjantov. Statistical Disclosure or Intersection Attacks on Anonymity Systems, Information Hiding 2004.
• George Danezis, Len Sassaman, Heartbeat Traffic to Counter (n-1) Attacks, WPES'03.
• George Danezis: The Statistical Disclosure Attack. Sec2003.
• George Danezis, Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson: Mixminion: Design of a Type III Anonymous Remailer. IEEE Security & Privacy 2003.
• George Danezis: Mix-networks with Restricted Routes PET 2003.
• George Danezis: Forward Secure Mixes. NORDSEC 2002.
• Richard Clayton, George Danezis: Chaffinch: Confidentiality in the Face of Legal Threats. Information Hiding 2002: 70-86. 
• Andrei Serjantov, George Danezis: Towards an Information Theoretic Metric for Anonymity. Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2002. Award at PET2003.
• Richard Clayton, George Danezis, Markus G. Kuhn: Real World Patterns of Failure in Anonymity Systems. Information Hiding 2001: 230-244.
• George Danezis: An Anonymous Auction Protocol Using "Money Escrow" (Transcript of Discussion). Security Protocols Workshop 2000: 223-233

Unpublished manuscripts / lecture notes / invited talks

• George Danezis: Introducing Traffic Analysis: Attacks, Defences and Public Policy Issues... (Invited Talk). Santa's Crypto Get-together. Prague, December 2005. Also at 23C3, Berlin.
• George Danezis: Traffic Analysis of the HTTP Protocol over TLS.
• Mike Bond, George Danezis. A pact with the Devil. Technical report UCAM-CL-TR-666, University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, June 2006
• George Danezis and Richard Clayton. Introducing Traffic Analysis. Chapter in Digital privacy. Auerbach Publications, ISBN: 9781420052176.
• George Danezis and Claudia Diaz. A survey of anonymous communication channels. Microsoft Research Technical Report (MSR-TR-2008-35). January 2008.

Ph.D

I completed my Ph.D. at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. My supervisor was Prof. Ross J. Anderson, in the security group. My doctoral thesis entitled Better Anonymous Communications and the associated technical report Designing and Attacking Anonymous Communication Systems (UCAM-CL-TR-594) are available.

Links

News: bbc, slashdot, infoanarchy, cryptome, The Register (security)
Security: Security focus, Security Portal counterpane (incidents, cryptogram, links, papers), cert (activity, incidents, advisories),
stoa, cip, rand( publications, national security), fipr, freedom, freenet, anonymizer, freehaven (related), hushmail, pgpi, putty, Network Anonymity, Opennap, Gnutella, JAP, Prayer
Archives: UKmirrors, Sunsite
Reference: Open directory, citations, Security Bibliography, Springer, Cyptography, Statistics
Free Books: Security Engineering, Inference, Handbook of Applied Crypto
Journals: IJIS, JCS, IEEE S+P, Electronic letters, Surveillance & Society

How you can contact me

George Danezis
Microsoft Research Cambridge
Roger Needham Building
7 J J Thomson Avenue
Cambridge, CB3 0FB, U.K.

Phone:   +44 (1223) 479812 X3812 
Email:   gdane at microsoft com