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

In 2020 I also co-founded a small start-up called Chorograph with my colleague Ben Steer from Queen Mary. Our specialty is distributed temporal graph analytics, since most platforms are either too slow or cannot perform this kind of analysis. Come say hello.

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 Experience 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

• An Empirical Analysis of Privacy in the Lightning Network (arXiv, version_1, coindesk)
  George Kappos, Haaroon Yousaf, Ania Piotrowska, Sanket Kanjalkar, Sergi Delgado-Segura, Andrew Miller and Sarah Meiklejohn
  Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2021
  This paper analyses privacy in the lightning network.

• Tracing Transactions Across Cryptocurrency Ledgers (bibtex+talk, slides, old-paper-version, blogpost, MIT Technology Review
  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.

  Source code for this project and instructions on how to repeat the entire paper can be found here on github

• 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, ZCon0 Presentation by Mary Maller)
  George Kappos, Haaroon Yousaf, Mary Maller, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  27th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX ‘18)

  Source code for this project and instructions on how to repeat the entire paper can be found here on github

Much of my research is done in collaboration with my colleagues Sarah Meiklejohn and George Kappos.

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, The Initiative For CryptoCurrencies & Contracts (IC3), Chainalysis, Conferences (USENIX, AFT) 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

Blogposts

I’ve written and co-written a number of blog posts you may find on the internet, some of which include

• Blockchain/Bitcoin data, transactions, What does this all mean?
• Bitcoin, Blockchain and Smart Contracts
• Tracing transactions across cryptocurrency ledgers, (Re-published at Chorograph.com)
• The pools run dry, Analyzing anonymity in Zcash

Teaching

TA unless otherwise stated

• 2019/20
  • Systems Engineering, University College London
  • Security, University College London
• 2018/19
  • C Programming, University College London
  • Systems Engineering, University College London
  • Cryptocurrencies, University College London
• 2017/18
  • Demonstrator, Interaction Design, University of Cambridge
  • Introduction to Programming, University College London
• 2016/17
  • Operating Systems, Queen Mary University of London
• 2015/16
  • Peer Assisted Student Support, Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London

Majority of my supervisions are with my amazing one-of-a-kind colleagues George Kappos and Sarah Meiklejohn.

Events

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

• 29th USENIX Security Symposium - USENIX ‘20 (remote)
• IC3 2020 Blockchain Camp
• Isolation Station (cause of this new virus)
• 36th Chaos Communication Congress (36c3)
• IC3 2019 Fall Retreat
• Advances in Financial Technology (AFT) 2019 (Invited speaker)
• 28th USENIX Security Symposium - USENIX ‘19
• 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(I highly recommend this summer school! It was really fun.)
• 3rd IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)
• 34th Chaos Communication Congress (34c3)
• 2nd London Cryptoday 2017
• MWR HackFu 2016(My first security-based hackathon!)
• Facebook London Hackathon 2013(My first hackathon!)

Consulting

Sorry I very busy right now, no can do.

Contact

Address
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

Here is another,me during the rona.

FYI this site also uses Google Analytics. Sorry for privacy and that.