Bio

I am a second year Computer Science PhD student in the Information Security Group at UCL (University College London). Researching Cryptocurrencies and Underground Markets under the supervision of Dr Sarah Meiklejohn (in the past with Professor Jens Groth), supported by the EU 2020 project. I am also apart of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3).

My history is as follows, I completed a Masters of Philosophy (MPhil) in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge under supervision of Dr Richard Clayton. My project was on “Discerning Patterns in the Compromise of Websites”. I completed an undergraduate degree in Computer Science with Industrial Expereince at Queen Mary, University of London. With my thesis under the supervision of Dr Paulo Oliva.

For my industrial year I worked as a full time technical analyst at Goldman Sachs.

Publications

• Tracing Transactions Across Cryptocurrency Ledgers (bibtex+talk, slides,old-paper-version,blogpost)
  Haaroon Yousaf, George Kappos and Sarah Meiklejohn
  28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX ‘19)
  This paper looks at tracing and tracking transactions that go across different cryptocurrency ledgers making use of transactions from ShapeShift.

• Why is a Ravencoin Like a TokenDesk? An Exploration of Code Diversity in the Cryptocurrency Landscape (arxiv - long version, short version)
  Pierre Reibel, Haaroon Yousaf, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2019
  

• Incentivising Privacy in Cryptocurrencies, Short Paper & Poster (arxiv)
  Sarah Azouvi, Haaroon Yousaf, Alexander Hicks
  OPERANDI 2018

• An Empirical Analysis of Anonymity in Zcash (bibtex+talk, arxiv, blogpost, slides, Coindesk, The Morning Paper, Vice, Motherboard, Bitcoin Exchange Guide )
  George Kappos, Haaroon Yousaf, Mary Maller, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  27th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX ‘18)

Other research papers done by my colleagues can be found here http://blockchains.cs.ucl.ac.uk/

Talks

I’ve given talks at Elliptic, WorkOnBlockchain, Kings College London, London Blockchain PhD Meetup, Interpol, UCL and probobaly others I cant remember.

Slides

Learn the basics of multi-input clustering in cryptocurrencies

Slides for An Empirical Analysis of Anonymity in Zcash Talk

Slides for Tracing Transactions Across Cryptocurrency Ledgers

Teaching

TA unless otherwise stated

• 2019
  • Cryptocurrencies, University College London
  • Systems Engineering, University College London
• 2018
  • Systems Engineering, University College London
  • C Programming, University College London
• 2017
  • Introduction to Programming, University College London
  • Demonstrator, Interaction Design, University of Cambridge
• 2016
  • Operating Systems, Queen Mary University of London
• 2015
  • Peer Assisted Student Support, Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London

Majority of my supervisions are with my colleagues George Kappos and Sarah Meiklejohn.

Events

A list of some of the events I've been to in reverse chronological order.

• 35th Chaos Communication Congress (35c3)
• 27th USENIX Security Symposium - USENIX ‘18
• The 18th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium - 2018(presented a short poster on privacy in cryptocurrencies, see OPERANDI 2018 above)
• Google Web Security Summit 2018 (presented a paper on Zcash research)
• Summer school on real-world crypto and privacy
• 3rd IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)
• 34th Chaos Communication Congress (34c3)
• 2nd London Cryptoday 2017
• MWR HackFu 2016
• Facebook London Hackathon 2013

Consulting

Sorry I very busy right now, no can do.

Contact

Address
622 Malet Place Engineering Building
University College London
Dept. of Computer Science
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

Desk Phone: The desk phone has mysteriously vanished! Ow no!

Email: h[dot]yousaf[at]ucl[dot]ac[dot]uk

• GitHub
• LinkedIn

You can click here to see what I may look like. Here is a HD version of me covering my head with a cap.