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Bentham’s Gaze

benthamsgaze.org

Information Security Research & Education, University College London (UCL)

SecurityCrypto / fintechSociety / politics / economy

’15’16’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
182 from 7 Jan 2015 to 8 Sep 2026
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now and then (3 in the last year)
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community
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2026 3

  1. A radio treasure hunt for National Coding Week
  2. UCL’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic: a historical archive
  3. The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography

2025 4

  1. A Festschrift Celebration for Professor Angela Sasse
  2. $5 Wrench Attacks: When Cryptocurrency Crime Get Physical
  3. Protect now, reveal later: a scalable Time-Lock Puzzle solution
  4. A Privacy Framework for Research Using Social Media Data

2024 2

  1. Mitigating Deep Reinforcement Learning Backdoors
  2. Exploring the Edges of Blockchain Technology: A Deep Dive into MEV and Oracles

2023 6

  1. A Regulatory “Trial and Error” Phase Shaping the Cryptocurrency Ecosystem
  2. Rugpull reports in the DeFi jungle
  3. Return of a new version of Drinik Android malware targeting Indian Taxpayers
  4. The Acropalypse vulnerability in Windows Snip and Sketch, lessons for developer-centered security
  5. A well-executed exercise in snake oil evaluation
  6. What is Synthetic Data? The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

2022 4

  1. “I am yet to meet a young person that has not experienced some form of abuse via tech”
  2. Vulnerability in Linux containers – investigation and mitigation
  3. The legal rule that computers are presumed to be operating correctly – unforeseen and unjust consequences
  4. US proposes to protect bank customers from Authorised Push Payment fraud

2021 8

  1. Pre-loading HSTS for sibling domains through this one weird trick
  2. Apple letting the content-scanning genie out of the bottle
  3. Exploring an Attack on Image Scaling Algorithms
  4. What went wrong with Horizon: learning from the Post Office Trial
  5. Making sense of EMV card data – how to decode the TLV data format
  6. Evidence Critical Systems: Designing for Dispute Resolution
  7. Aggregatable Distributed Key Generation
  8. Still treating users as the enemy: entrapment and the escalating nastiness of simulated phishing campaigns

2020 6

  1. Thoughts on the Future Implications of Microsoft’s Legal Approach towards the TrickBot Takedown
  2. Winkle – Decentralised Checkpointing for Proof-of-Stake
  3. The role of usability, power dynamics, and incentives in dispute resolutions around computer evidence
  4. Transparency, evidence and dispute resolution
  5. By revisiting security training through economics principles, organisations can navigate how to support effective security behaviour change
  6. Consider unintended harms of cybersecurity controls, as they might harm the people you are trying to protect

2019 24

  1. Resolving disputes through computer evidence: lessons from the Post Office Trial
  2. We’re fighting the good fight, but are we making full use of the armoury?
  3. UK Parliament on protecting consumers from economic crime
  4. Forcing phone companies to secure SMS authentication would cause more harm than good
  5. A Marlin is One of the Fastest SNARKs in the Ocean
  6. Measuring mobility without violating privacy – a case study of the London Underground
  7. A Reflection on the Waves Of Malice: Malicious File Distribution on the Web (part 2)
  8. A Reflection on the Waves Of Malice: Malicious File Distribution on the Web (part 1)
  9. Beyond Regulators’ Concerns, Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency Faces another Big Challenge: The Risk of Fraud
  10. Tracing transactions across cryptocurrency ledgers
  11. Next version of Android might introduce new security risks for online banking, 2FA, and more
  12. Confirmation of Payee is coming, but will it protect bank customers from fraud?
  13. UCL’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity
  14. Hiring Research Assistants and PhD students
  15. Will dispute resolution be Libra’s Achilles’ heel?
  16. Thoughts on the Libra blockchain: too centralised, not private, and won’t help the unbanked
  17. Digital Exclusion and Fraud – the Dark Side of Payments Authentication
  18. Efficient Cryptographic Arguments and Proofs – Or How I Became a Fractional Monetary Unit
  19. How Accidental Data Breaches can be Facilitated by Windows 10 and macOS Mojave
  20. Science “of” or “for” security?
  21. The Government published its draft domestic abuse bill, but risks ignoring the growing threat of tech abuse
  22. TESSERACT’s evaluation framework and its use of MaMaDroid
  23. Introducing Sonic: A Practical zk-SNARK with a Nearly Trustless Setup
  24. Protecting human rights by avoiding regulatory capture within surveillance oversight

2018 33

  1. Memes are taking the alt-right’s message of hate mainstream
  2. Exploring the multiple dimensions of Internet liveness through holographic visualisation
  3. New threat models in the face of British intelligence and the Five Eyes’ new end-to-end encryption interception strategy
  4. UCL runs a digital security training event aimed at domestic abuse support services
  5. Justice for victims of bank fraud – learning from the Post Office trial
  6. Coconut E-Petition Implementation
  7. UK Faster Payment System Prompts Changes to Fraud Regulation
  8. What We Disclose When We Choose Not To Disclose: Privacy Unraveling Around Explicit HIV Disclosure Fields
  9. Can Ethics Help Restore Internet Freedom and Safety?
  10. When Convenience Creates Risk: Taking a Deeper Look at Security Code AutoFill on iOS 12 and macOS Mojave
  11. On Location, Time, and Membership: Studying How Aggregate Location Data Can Harm Users’ Privacy
  12. Measuring and Modeling the Vivino Wine Social Network
  13. Stronger Password, Longer Lifetime: Studying UCL’s password policy
  14. What can infosec learn from strategic theory?
  15. An untapped resource to reproduce studies
  16. Managing conflicts between ethical principles and job duties
  17. JavaCard: The execution environment you didn’t know you were using
  18. Will new UK rules reduce the harm of push-payment fraud?
  19. Attack papers are case studies
  20. Security code AutoFill: is this new iOS feature a security risk for online banking?
  21. Improving the auditability of access to data requests
  22. Scanning the Internet for Liveness
  23. Tampering with OpenPGP digitally signed messages by exploiting multi-part messages
  24. “The pool’s run dry” – analyzing anonymity in Zcash
  25. Scanning beyond the horizon: long-term planning for cybersecurity and the post-quantum challenge
  26. Incentives in Security Protocols
  27. “Wow such genetics. So data. Very forever?” – An overview of the blockchain genomics trend
  28. Coconut: Threshold Issuance Selective Disclosure Credentials with Applications to Distributed Ledgers
  29. Thinking about fake news – As a security incident?
  30. A witch-hunt for trojans in our chips
  31. An investigation of online censorship in Cyprus
  32. Smart Contracts and Bribes
  33. Practicing a science of security

2017 28

  1. A Critical Analysis of Genome Privacy Research
  2. Systematizing Consensus in the Age of Blockchains
  3. How 4chan and The_Donald Influence the Fake News Ecosystem
  4. Liability for push payment fraud pushed onto the victims
  5. Should you phish your own employees?
  6. Chainspace: A Sharded Smart Contracts Platform
  7. The end of the billion-user Password:Impossible
  8. Creating scalable distributed ledgers for DECODE
  9. Top ten obstacles along distributed ledgers’ path to adoption
  10. Caveat emptor: Privacy could turn UK’s genomic dream into a nightmare
  11. Preventing phishing won’t stop ransomware spreading
  12. EPFL blockchain summer school
  13. Can we make people value IT security?
  14. Find Security Champions in Blends of Organisational Culture
  15. Observing the WannaCry fallout: confusing advice and playing the blame game
  16. PayBreak able to defeat WannaCry/WannaCryptor ransomware
  17. The politics of the NHS WannaCrypt ransomware outbreak
  18. Underground abraCARDabra: Understanding carding forums
  19. Online security won’t improve until companies stop passing the buck to the customer
  20. Can Games Fix What’s Wrong with Computer Security Education?
  21. MAMADROID: Detecting Android Malware by Building Markov Chains of Behavioral Models
  22. Battery Status Not Included: Assessing Privacy in W3C Web Standards
  23. What the CIA hack and leak teaches us about the bankruptcy of current “Cyber” doctrines
  24. Double-Fetch Situations Turn into Double-Fetch Vulnerabilities: A Study of Double Fetches in the Linux Kernel
  25. Diversity is our strength
  26. On the security and privacy of the ultrasound tracking ecosystem
  27. Inaugural Lecture: Zero-Knowledge Proofs
  28. Security intrusions as mechanisms

2016 34

  1. Privacy analysis of the W3C Proximity Sensor specification
  2. Blockchains and Why We Need Privacy
  3. A Longitudinal Measurement Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web
  4. Understanding the Use of Leaked Webmail Credentials in the Wild
  5. Strong Customer Authentication in the Payment Services Directive 2
  6. A Privacy Enhancing Architecture for Secure Wearable Devices
  7. How to do Zero-Knowledge from Discrete-Logs in under 7kB
  8. Yes, we have no receipts
  9. QUUX: a QUIC un-multiplexing of the Tor relay transport
  10. Battery Status readout as a privacy risk
  11. Steven Murdoch – Privacy and Financial Security
  12. Moving towards security and privacy experiments for the real world
  13. Do you know what you’re paying for? How contactless cards are still vulnerable to relay attack
  14. Analyzing privacy aspects of the W3C Vibration API
  15. Microsoft Ireland: winning the battle for privacy but losing the war
  16. Cybersecurity: Supporting a Resilient and Trustworthy System for the UK
  17. Workshop: Theory and Practice of Secure Multiparty Computation
  18. User-centred security awareness empowers employees to be the strongest defense
  19. Smart contracts beyond the age of innocence
  20. Exceptional access provisions in the Investigatory Powers Bill
  21. International Comparison of Bank Fraud Reimbursement: Customer Perceptions and Contractual Terms
  22. Adblocking and Counter-Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Race
  23. On the hunt for Facebook’s army of fake likes
  24. Come work with us!
  25. Bitcoin workshop at Financial Crypto 2016
  26. Biometrics for payments
  27. Privately gathering statistics and training simple models
  28. “Do you see what I see?” ask Tor users, as a large number of websites reject them but accept non-Tor users
  29. Are Payment Card Contracts Unfair?
  30. Jens Groth – Non-interactive zero knowledge proofs, efficient enough to be used in practice
  31. Our contributions to the UK Distributed Ledger Technology report
  32. First UCL team competes in the International Capture The Flag competition
  33. Insecure by design: protocols for encrypted phone calls
  34. ACE-CSR opening event 2015/16: talks on malware, location privacy and wiretap law

2015 30

  1. Nicolas Courtois – Algebraic cryptanalysis is not the best way to break something, but sometimes it is the only option
  2. How Tor’s privacy was (momentarily) broken, and the questions it raises
  3. New EU Innovative Training Network project “Privacy & Us”
  4. Forced authorisation chip and PIN scam hitting high-end retailers
  5. Program obfuscation
  6. Scaling Tor hidden services
  7. Sarah Meiklejohn – Security and Cryptography
  8. Category errors in (information) security: how logic can help
  9. An Analysis of Reshipping Mule Scams
  10. George Danezis – Smart grid privacy, peer-to-peer and social network security
  11. Just how sophisticated will card fraud techniques become?
  12. Gianluca Stringhini – Cyber criminal operations and developing systems to defend against them
  13. Mathematical Modelling in the Two Cultures
  14. What are the social costs of contactless fraud?
  15. Experimenting with SSL Vulnerabilities in Android Apps
  16. Teaching Privacy Enhancing Technologies at UCL
  17. UCL Code Breaking Competition
  18. Measuring Internet Censorship
  19. Understanding Online Dating Scams
  20. Teaching cybersecurity to criminologists
  21. One-out-of-Many Proofs: Or How to Leak a Secret and Spend a Coin
  22. MSc Information Security @UCL
  23. Banks undermine chip and PIN security because they see profits rise faster than fraud
  24. A Digital Magna Carta?
  25. Why Bentham’s Gaze?
  26. Is sending shoppers ads by Bluetooth just a bit creepy?
  27. On-line lecture: DP5 Private Presence @ 31C3
  28. Sequencing your genome is becoming an affordable reality – but at what personal cost?
  29. Tor: the last bastion of online anonymity, but is it still secure after Silk Road?
  30. Introducing the expanded UCL Information Security Group