Sarah Meiklejohn


Bio

Photo of Sarah I am a Professor in Cryptography and Security at University College London (UCL) and a Staff Research Scientist at Google. At UCL, I am affiliated with the Information Security Group in the Computer Science department. I am also an Associate Director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3).
 
I received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego under the joint supervision of Mihir Bellare and Stefan Savage. During my PhD, I spent the summers of 2011 and 2013 at MSR Redmond, working in the cryptography group with Melissa Chase. I obtained an Sc.M. in Computer Science from Brown University under the guidance of Anna Lysyanskaya in 2009, and an Sc.B. in Mathematics from Brown in 2008.  

Contact

s.meiklejohn [at] ucl [dot] ac [dot] uk
 
Department of Computer Science
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT

Projects

Supervision

I am not working full-time at UCL, which means I am not taking on any postdocs, PhD students, or interns for now. This means that if you email me asking for such a position I will not respond. Thanks for understanding!
 
I am fortunate to have worked with the following people in the past:

Publications

(Click year to show/hide)

2025

[C : Oakland] Supporting Human Raters with the Detection of Harmful Content Using Large Language Models
  • Kurt Thomas, Patrick Gage Kelley, David Tao, Sarah Meiklejohn, Owen Vallis, Shunwen Tan, Blaž Bratanič, Felipe Tiengo Ferreira, Vijay Kumar Eranti, and Elie Bursztein
  • IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

2024

[C : IMC] Give and Take: An End-to-End Investigation of Giveaway Scam Conversion Rates
  • Enze Liu, George Kappos, Eric Mugnier, Luca Invernizzi, Stefan Savage, David Tao, Kurt Thomas, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • Internet Measurement Conference
[C : USENIX Security] Understanding Help-Seeking and Help-Giving on Social Media for Image-Based Sexual Abuse
  • Miranda Wei, Sunny Consolvo, Patrick Gage Kelley, Tadayoshi Kohno, Tara Matthews, Sarah Meiklejohn, Franziska Roesner, Renee Shelby, Kurt Thomas, and Rebecca Umbach
  • USENIX Security Symposium

2023

[C : Crypto] Bingo: Adaptivity and Asynchrony in Verifiable Secret Sharing and Distributed Key Generation (slides)
  • Ittai Abraham, Philipp Jovanovic, Sarah Meiklejohn, Mary Maller, and Gilad Stern
  • Crypto
[C : USENIX Security] ACORN: Input Validation for Secure Aggregation
  • James Bell, Adrià Gascón, Tancrède Lepoint, Baiyu Li, Sarah Meiklejohn, Mariana Raykova, and Cathie Yun
  • USENIX Security Symposium
[C : USENIX Security] One Server for the Price of Two: Simple and Fast Single-Server Private Information Retrieval
  • Alexandra Henzinger, Matthew M. Hong, Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, Sarah Meiklejohn, and Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • USENIX Security Symposium
  • (The source code for this project can be found here.)
[C : FC] Forsage: Anatomy of a Smart-Contract Pyramid Scheme
  • Tyler Kell, Haaroon Yousaf, Sarah Allen, Sarah Meiklejohn, and Ari Juels
  • Financial Cryptography and Data Security
  • (The blog post for this project can be found here.)

2022

[C : USENIX Security] How to Peel a Million: Validating and Expanding Bitcoin Clusters (slides)
  • George Kappos, Haaroon Yousaf, Rainer Stütz, Sofia Rollet, Bernhard Haslhofer, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • USENIX Security Symposium
[J : PETS] SoK: SCT Auditing in Certificate Transparency (slides)
  • Sarah Meiklejohn, Joe DeBlasio, Devon O'Brien, Chris Thompson, Kevin Yeo, and Emily Stark
  • Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

2021

[C : PODC] Reaching Consensus for Asynchronous Distributed Key Generation
  • Gilad Stern, Ittai Abraham, Philipp Jovanovic, Sarah Meiklejohn, Alin Tomescu, and Mary Maller
  • ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
[C : Eurocrypt] Aggregatable Distributed Key Generation
  • Kobi Gurkan, Philipp Jovanovic, Mary Maller, Sarah Meiklejohn, Gilad Stern, and Alin Tomescu
  • Eurocrypt
  • (The blog post for this project can be found here.)
[C : DIS] Problematising Transparency Through LARP And Deliberation
  • Kruakae Pothong, Larissa Pschetz, Ruth Catlow, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • Designing Interactive Systems
  • (This paper received an Honorable Mention Award!)
[C : Oakland] SoK: Hate, Harassment, and the Changing Landscape of Online Abuse
  • Kurt Thomas, Devdatta Akhawe, Michael Bailey, Dan Boneh, Elie Bursztein, Sunny Consolvo, Nicki Dell, Zakir Durumeric, Patrick Gage Kelley, Deepak Kumar, Damon McCoy, Sarah Meiklejohn, Thomas Ristenpart, and Gianluca Stringhini
  • IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
[W : WTSC] Pay to Win: Cheap, Cross-Chain Bribing Attacks on PoW Cryptocurrencies
  • Aljosha Judmayer, Nicholas Stifter, Alexei Zamyatin, Itay Tsabary, Ittay Eyal, Peter Gaži, Sarah Meiklejohn and Edgar Weippl
  • The Fifth Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts
[W : WTSC] SoK: Algorithmic Incentive Manipulation Attacks on Permissionless PoW Cryptocurrencies
  • Aljosha Judmayer, Nicholas Stifter, Alexei Zamyatin, Itay Tsabary, Ittay Eyal, Peter Gaži, Sarah Meiklejohn and Edgar Weippl
  • The Fifth Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts
[C : FC] An Empirical Analysis of Privacy in the Lightning Network
  • George Kappos, Haaroon Yousaf, Ania M. Piotrowska, Sanket Kanjalkar, Sergi Delgado-Segura, Andrew Miller, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • Financial Cryptography and Data Security

2020

[M : Brookings] Design Choices for Central Bank Digital Currency: Policy and Technical Considerations
  • Sarah Allen, Srdjan Čapkun, Ittay Eyal, Giulia Fanti, Bryan Ford, James Grimmelman, Ari Juels, Kari Kostianien, Sarah Meiklejohn, Andrew Miller, Eswar Prasad, Karl Wüst, and Fan Zhang
  • Brookings Institute Working Paper
[J : PETS] Reputable List Curation from Decentralized Voting (concurrent version)
  • Elizabeth Crites, Mary Maller, Sarah Meiklejohn, and Rebekah Mercer
  • Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
  • (The source code for this project can be found here.)

2019

[C : Asiacrypt] Quisquis: A New Design for Anonymous Cryptocurrencies
  • Prastudy Fauzi, Claudio Orlandi, Sarah Meiklejohn, and Rebekah Mercer
  • Asiacrypt
[C : CCS] Sonic: Zero-Knowledge SNARKs from Linear-Size Universal and Updatable Structured Reference Strings
  • Mary Maller, Sean Bowe, Markulf Kohlweiss, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
  • (The source code for this project can be found here, and the blog post here.)
[C : AFT] SoK: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains
  • Shehar Bano, Alberto Sonnino, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Sarah Azouvi, Patrick McCorry, Sarah Meiklejohn, and George Danezis
  • ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technology
[C : AFT] PISA: Arbitration Outsourcing for State Channels
  • Patrick McCorry, Surya Bakshi, Iddo Bentov, Sarah Meiklejohn, and Andrew Miller
  • ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technology
  • (The blog post for this project can be found here.)
[C : USENIX Security] Tracing Transactions Across Cryptocurrency Ledgers
  • Haaroon Yousaf, George Kappos, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • USENIX Security Symposium
  • (The blog post for this project can be found here, and it was featured in MIT Technology Review.)
[C : FC] Why is a Ravencoin Like a TokenDesk? An Exploration of Code Diversity in the Cryptocurrency Landscape (short version) (slides)
  • Pierre Reibel, Haaroon Yousaf, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • Financial Cryptography and Data Security
[C : NDSS] Coconut: Threshold Issuance Selective Disclosure Credentials with Applications to Distributed Ledgers
  • Alberto Sonnino, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Shehar Bano, Sarah Meiklejohn, and George Danezis
  • Network and Distributed System Security Symposium
  • (The source code for this project can be found here, and the blog post here.)

2018

[W : CBT] Contour: A Practical System for Binary Transparency
  • Mustafa Al-Bassam and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • International Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology
  • (The source code for this project can be found here.)
[C : Crypto] Updatable and Universal Common Reference Strings with Applications to zk-SNARKs
  • Jens Groth, Markulf Kohlweiss, Mary Maller, Sarah Meiklejohn, and Ian Miers
  • Crypto
[C : USENIX Security] An Empirical Analysis of Anonymity in Zcash
  • George Kappos, Haaroon Yousaf, Mary Maller, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • USENIX Security Symposium
  • (The source code for this project can be found here, and the blog post here.)
[J : S&P] Top Ten Obstacles along Distributed Ledgers' Path to Adoption (slides)
  • Sarah Meiklejohn
  • IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, July/August 2018
  • (The blog post for this project can be found here.)
[J : PETS] Möbius: Trustless Tumbling for Transaction Privacy
  • Sarah Meiklejohn and Rebekah Mercer
  • Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
  • (The source code for this project can be found here.)
[W : BITCOIN] Egalitarian Society or Benevolent Dictatorship? The State of Cryptocurrency Governance
  • Sarah Azouvi, Mary Maller, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • The Fifth Workshop on Bitcoin and Blockchain Research
[W : BITCOIN] Smart Contracts for Bribing Miners
  • Patrick McCorry, Alexander Hicks, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • The Fifth Workshop on Bitcoin and Blockchain Research
  • (The source code for this project can be found here, and the blog post here.)

2017

[W : CBT] Who Am I? Secure Identity Registration on Distributed Ledgers
  • Sarah Azouvi, Mustafa Al-Bassam, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • International Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology

2016

[C : Asiacrypt] Déjà Q All Over Again: Tighter and Broader Reductions of q-Type Assumptions
  • Melissa Chase, Mary Maller, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • Asiacrypt
[C : CCS] Transparency Overlays and Applications (slides)
  • Melissa Chase and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
[J : CACM] A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names
  • Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole, Grant Jordan, Kirill Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage
  • Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery
[C : NDSS] Centrally Banked Cryptocurrencies (slides)
  • George Danezis and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • Network and Distributed System Security Symposium
  • (This work was featured in MIT Technology Review.)
  • (The source code for this project can be found here.)

2015

[C : PKC] A Profitable Sub-Prime Loan: Obtaining the Advantages of Composite Order in Prime-Order Bilinear Groups
  • Allison Lewko and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • IACR International Conference on Practice and Theory of Public-Key Cryptography
[W : BITCOIN] Privacy-Enhancing Overlays in Bitcoin (slides)
  • Sarah Meiklejohn and Claudio Orlandi
  • The Second Workshop on Bitcoin Research

2014

[C : CCS] Algebraic MACs and Keyed-Verification Anonymous Credentials
  • Melissa Chase, Sarah Meiklejohn, and Greg Zaverucha
  • ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
[J : TCAD] Leveraging Gate-Level Properties to Identify Hardware Timing Channels
  • Jason Oberg, Sarah Meiklejohn, Timothy Sherwood, and Ryan Kastner
  • IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, September 2014
[C : CSF] Malleable Signatures: New Definitions and Delegatable Anonymous Credentials
  • Melissa Chase, Markulf Kohlweiss, Anna Lysyanskaya, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • Computer Science Foundations Symposium
[C : Eurocrypt] Key-Versatile Signatures and Applications: RKA, KDM, and Joint Enc/Sig
  • Mihir Bellare, Sarah Meiklejohn, and Susan Thomson
  • Eurocrypt
[C : Eurocrypt] Déjà Q: Using Dual Systems to Revisit q-Type Assumptions (slides)
  • Melissa Chase and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • Eurocrypt
[M : Thesis] Flexible Models for Secure Systems (slides)
  • UCSD Dissertation, April 2014
  • (This won UCSD's 2015 Chancellor's Dissertation Medal (see here and here). Thanks!)
[C : NDSS] Botcoin: Monetizing Stolen Cycles
  • Danny Yuxing Huang, Hitesh Dharmdasani, Sarah Meiklejohn, Vacha Dave, Chris Grier, Damon McCoy, Stefan Savage, Nicholas Weaver, Alex C. Snoeren, and Kirill Levchenko
  • Network and Distributed System Security Symposium
[C : CT-RSA] Rethinking Verifiably Encrypted Signatures: A Gap in Functionality and Potential Solutions (slides)
  • Theresa Calderon, Sarah Meiklejohn, Hovav Shacham, and Brent Waters
  • Cryptographer's Track at the RSA Conference

2013

[J : login] A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names
  • Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole, Grant Jordan, Kirill Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage
  • USENIX ;login:, December 2013
  • (Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
[C : IMC] A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names (slides)
[C : DATE] A Practical Testing Framework for Isolating Hardware Timing Channels
  • Jason Oberg, Sarah Meiklejohn, Timothy Sherwood, and Ryan Kastner
  • Design, Automation, and Test in Europe
[C : TCC] Succinct Malleable NIZKs and an Application to Compact Shuffles (slides)
  • Melissa Chase, Markulf Kohlweiss, Anna Lysyanskaya, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • Theory of Cryptography Conference
[C : PKC] Verifiable Elections That Scale for Free (slides)
  • Melissa Chase, Markulf Kohlweiss, Anna Lysyanskaya, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • International Conference on Practice and Theory of Public-Key Cryptography

2012

[C : Eurocrypt] Malleable Proof Systems and Applications (slides)
  • Melissa Chase, Markulf Kohlweiss, Anna Lysyanskaya, and Sarah Meiklejohn
  • Eurocrypt

2011

[C : USENIX Security] The Phantom Tollbooth: Privacy-Preserving Electronic Toll Collection in the Presence of Driver Collusion (slides)
  • Sarah Meiklejohn, Keaton Mowery, Stephen Checkoway, and Hovav Shacham
  • USENIX Security Symposium
[W : WOOT] Heat of the Moment: Characterizing the Efficacy of Thermal Camera-Based Attacks (slides)
  • Keaton Mowery, Sarah Meiklejohn, and Stefan Savage
  • USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies

2010

[C : Asiacrypt] Limitations on Transformations from Composite-Order to Prime-Order Groups: The Case of Round-Optimal Blind Signatures (slides)
  • Sarah Meiklejohn, Hovav Shacham, and David Mandell Freeman
  • Asiacrypt
[C : USENIX Security] ZKPDL: A Language-Based System for Efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Electronic Cash (slides)
  • Sarah Meiklejohn, C. Chris Erway, Alptekin Küpçü, Theodora Hinkle, and Anna Lysyanskaya
  • USENIX Security Symposium
  • (The source code for this project can be found here, and the project homepage here.)

2009

[M : Thesis] An Extension of the Groth-Sahai Proof System
  • Brown University Masters thesis, May 2009

Teaching

Events

Program (co-)chair

Associate chair

Program committee member

Photo credit: Rosa Koolhoven