George Danezis – Smart grid privacy, peer-to-peer and social network security

“I work on technical aspects of privacy,” says George Danezis, a reader in security and privacy engineering at UCL and part of the Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR). There are, of course, many other limitations: regulatory, policy, economic. But, he says, “Technology is the enabler for everything else – though you need everything else for it to be useful.” Danezis believes providing privacy at the technology level is particularly important as it seems clear that both regulation and the “moralising” approach (telling people the things they shouldn’t do) have failed.

There are many reasons why someone gets interested in researching technical solutions to intractable problems. Sometimes the motivation is to eliminate a personal frustration; other times it’s simply a fascination with the technology itself. For Danezis, it began with other people.

“I discovered that a lot of the people around me could not use technology out of the box to do things personally or collectively.” For example, he saw NGOs defending human rights worry about sending an email or chatting online, particularly in countries hostile to their work. A second motivation had to do with timing: when he began work it wasn’t yet clear that the Internet would develop into a medium anyone could use freely to publish stories. That particular fear has abated, but other issues such as the need for anonymous communications and private data sharing are still with us.

“Without anonymity we can’t offer strong privacy,” he says.

Unlike many researchers, Danezis did not really grow up with computers. He spent his childhood in Greece and Belgium, and until he got Internet access at 16, “I had access only to the programming books I could find in an average Belgian bookshop. There wasn’t a BBC Micro in every school and it was difficult to find information. I had one teacher who taught me how to program in Logo, and no way of finding more information easily.” Then he arrived at Cambridge in 1997, and “discovered thousands of people who knew how to do crazy stuff with computers.”

Danezis’ key research question is, “What functionality can we achieve while still attaining a degree of hard privacy?” And the corollary: at what cost in complexity of engineering? “We can’t just say, let’s recreate the whole computer environment,” he said. “We need to evolve efficiently out of today’s situation.”

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