Sarah Meiklejohn

Bio

I’ve really enjoyed working as an academic thus far, and as of November 2025 I’m taking a break and spending the majority of my time exploring other things. I may share some of the fruits of this exploration here at some point, but in the meantime if you’re curious about what I’m up to (or have an incredible opportunity to offer me, or just want to say hi) please do email me.

Prior to my resignation, I was a Staff Research Scientist at Google and an Associate Director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), where I am still a faculty member. I am also still a Professor in Cryptography and Security at University College London (UCL), where I am affiliated with the Information Security Group in the Computer Science department.

Many of the highlights of my career have involved co-organizing workshops and chairing conferences; speaking at summer schools and conferences (like giving an invited talk at Eurocrypt); teaching (like an undergraduate computer security module); and of course working with my wonderful collaborators and research group (more on them below).

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 two summers at Microsoft Research Redmond, working in the cryptography group with Melissa Chase. I obtained an Sc.B. in Mathematics and an Sc.M. in Computer Science from Brown University, under the guidance of Anna Lysyanskaya.

Contact

s.meiklejohn [at] ucl [dot] ac [dot] uk

Department of Computer Science
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT

Supervision

Because I am not working full-time at UCL, 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:

Maria Corte-Real Santos (PhD student)
George Kappos (PhD student)
Haaroon Yousaf (PhD student)
Sarah Azouvi (PhD student)
Elizabeth Crites (postdoc)
Mustafa Al-Bassam (PhD student)
Kruakae Pothong (postdoc)
Mary Maller (PhD student)
Sergi Delgado Segura (postdoc)
Shehar Bano (postdoc)
Patrick McCorry (postdoc)

Publications

(Click year to show/hide)

The list of papers below is incomplete, and my primary inclusion criteria was nostalgia (and recency) rather than perceived impact or importance. You can find a complete list on my Google Scholar page. Also, if you want the slides for a specific paper—even one that isn’t listed here or is from the distant past—please just email me (I am excluding them from my website in the interest of keeping it small but still have them all!).

2026

[C : USENIX Security]	Certification of Machine Learning Models via Directional Sharpness Gefei Tan, Adrià Gascón, Sarah Meiklejohn, and Mariana Raykova USENIX Security Symposium
[C : Oakland]	Single-Server Private Outsourcing of zk-SNARKs Kasra Abbaszadeh, Hossein Hafezi, Jonathan Katz, and Sarah meiklejohn IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
[C : CHI]	“It didn’t feel right but I needed a job so desperately”: Understanding People’s Emotions and Help Needs During Scams Jake Chanenson, Tara Matthews, Sunny Consolvo, Patrick Gage Kelley, Jessica McClearn, Sarah Meiklejohn, Abhishek Roy, Renee Shelby, Kurt Thomas, and Amelia Hassoun The CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
[C : NDSS]	SoK: Cryptographic Authenticated Dictionaries Harjasleen Malvai, Francesca Falzon, Andrew Zitek-Estrada, Sarah Meiklejohn, and Joseph Bonneau Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

2025

[C : NeurIPS]	Privacy Reasoning in Ambiguous Contexts Ren Yi, Octavian Suciu, Adrià Gascón, Sarah Meiklejohn, Eugene Bagdasarian, and Marco Gruteser Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
[C : CCS]	Founding Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Training on Optimum Vicinity Gefei Tan, Adrià Gascón, Sarah Meiklejohn, Mariana Raykova, Xiao Wang, and Ning Luo ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
[C : ICML]	Machine Learning Models Have a Supply Chain Problem Sarah Meiklejohn, Hayden Blauzvern, Mihai Maruseac, Spencer Schrock, Laurent Simon, and Ilia Shumailov International Conference on Machine Learning
[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 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.)

Older

[C : USENIX Security]	How to Peel a Million: Validating and Expanding Bitcoin Clusters George Kappos, Haaroon Yousaf, Rainer Stütz, Sofia Rollet, Bernhard Haslhofer, and Sarah Meiklejohn USENIX Security Symposium
[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
[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 : FC]	Why is a Ravencoin Like a TokenDesk? An Exploration of Code Diversity in the Cryptocurrency Landscape (short version) Pierre Reibel, Haaroon Yousaf, and Sarah Meiklejohn Financial Cryptography and Data Security
[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.)
[C : CCS]	Transparency Overlays and Applications Melissa Chase and Sarah Meiklejohn ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
[C : Eurocrypt]	Déjà Q: Using Dual Systems to Revisit q-Type Assumptions Melissa Chase and Sarah Meiklejohn Eurocrypt
[C : IMC]	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 Internet Measurement Conference (This work won a Test of Time Award at IMC 2024. It was also featured in Andy Greenberg’s fantastic book, Tracers in the Dark; an excerpt of the book appeared in Wired. Thanks!) (Back when this research first came out, it was featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Krebs on Security, The Washington Post, and more.)
[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 : Eurocrypt]	Malleable Proof Systems and Applications Melissa Chase, Markulf Kohlweiss, Anna Lysyanskaya, and Sarah Meiklejohn Eurocrypt
[W : WOOT]	Heat of the Moment: Characterizing the Efficacy of Thermal Camera-Based Attacks Keaton Mowery, Sarah Meiklejohn, and Stefan Savage USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies
[C : USENIX Security]	ZKPDL: A Language-Based System for Efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Electronic Cash 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.)