Security Seminar

Abstract not available

Software constantly evolves in response to user needs: new features are built, deployed, mature and grow old, and eventually their usage drops enough to merit switching them off. In any large codebase, this feature lifecycle can naturally lead to retaining unnecessary code and data. Removing these respects users’ privacy...

Conspiracy theories have become a pervasive and potent force in the digital age, challenging societies and democracies worldwide. This talk delves into the enigmatic origins of the QAnon conspiracy to offer a comprehensive analysis of the online fringe communities that facilitate such discourse. We employ a data-driven...

Man is born free, as Marx told us, but is everywhere in chains. The Internet promised freedom but is being turned into a tool of surveillance and control. The Foundation for Information Policy Research was launched in 1998 during 'Crypto War 1' in the run-up to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. After a quarter...

Randomness supports many critical functions in the field of machine learning (ML) including optimisation, data selection, privacy, and security. ML systems outsource the task of generating or harvesting randomness to the compiler, the cloud service provider or elsewhere in the toolchain. Yet there is a long history of...

In this talk I will focus on analysing the robustness of systems which depend on crowdsourced and sensor data. I will showcase vulnerabilities on mobile crowdsourcing services which can be exploited to launch data poisoning attacks successful in faking online posts for robberies, gunshots, and other dangerous incidents...

In this talk we will present a new technique for identifying software supply chain attacks. Supply chain attacks are particularly powerful due to their ability to affect many victims through the compromise of a single shared dependency. While supply chain attacks are not new, they have received significant industry...

The public key infrastructure that secures the web has been around for nearly three decades. Since 2012, it has become a critical (albeit unappreciated) aspect of daily life for billions of people. In that short time, a dizzying number of technologies to improve security and privacy on the web have been designed, deployed...

2-5% of global GDP – some $2-5T USD – is estimated to be associated with economic crime. Less than 1% of this is seized, while the total cost of compliance is around $274B USD: we are not winning this fight. This talk describes the work we do at Mastercard that seeks to move past the legacy approaches to economic crime...

As software developers, we often think about system design and patterns to make the sites we operate more reliable. But how can we turn that kind of systems thinking towards deplatforming hate sites that operate on the margins of the internet and thus reduce the extent of harm they can cause?