George Kappos

I am a Doctoral Researcher in the Information Security Group at UCL. I work under the supervision of Dr Sarah Meiklejohn and Professor Jens Groth. My research is funded by the EU project Titanium. I also work as a part-time contractor for Chainalysis.

Before that, I did my Bachelors in Computer Science at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and my MSc in Information Security at University College of London.

Research interest

My research interests are related to security, privacy and blockchain technologies with a special focus on cryptocurrencies. Currently my main focus is the investigation of privacy in cryptocurrencies.

News and Events

Our new paper analysing privacy properties of the Lightning Network is now available on arXiv (link). It was also recently covered by CoinDesk, and listed by zkCapital in their weekly Blockchain Research Issue.
During May '19-August '19 I worked as a research intern at Chainalysis. Currently I work for Chainalysis as a parti-time contractor.
Our paper Tracing Transactions Across Cryptocurrency Ledgers was accepted at USENIX Security Symposium'19. We presented it during the conference in Santa Clara, CA, USA. Slides
The Morning paper featured our work "An Empirical Analysis of Anonymity in Zcash" (link)
Our paper An Empirical Analysis of Anonymity in Zcash was accepted at USENIX Security Symposium'18. I presented it during the conference in Baltimore, MD, USA. You can watch my talk here. Slides
I attended the PETs Symposium in Barcelona, Spain.
I attended the Summer School on real-world crypto and privacy in Sibenik, Croatia

Publications

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 2021 (FC'21).
Tracing Transactions Across Cryptocurrency Ledgers
Haaroon Yousaf, George Kappos, and Sarah Meiklejohn,
USENIX Security Symposium 2019.
Extending Anonymity of Zcash
George Kappos and Ania M. Piotrowska,
Short paper.
An Empirical Analysis of Anonymity in Zcash
George Kappos, Haaroon Yousaf, Mary Maller, and Sarah Meiklejohn,
USENIX Security Symposium 2018.

Teaching

In addition to my research tasks, I am also a Teaching Assistant for Cryptocurrencies course (Information Security MSc, UCL) and Number Theory (Mathematics, Undergraduate, UCL). I also co-supervise MSc projects together with Dr Sarah Meiklejohn and Haaroon Yousaf.