RHUL Cyber CDT Blog

This April, many CDT cryptographers headed to Amsterdam to attend the Real World Crypto conference . For many, this was our first ever conference, and for almost all of us, the first conference since before the pandemic. RWC itself had already been rescheduled from January of this year due to a surge in cases in the Netherlands. RWC is intended as a conference for both academic researchers and industry professionals, with delegates from many organisations who design and implement cryptography in the wild. The program is designed to have talks with high real world impact - this year, the theme for the invited talks was Cryptography in the Ads Ecosystem, where representatives from Meta and Google Chrome spoke about their understanding and solutions to reconciling users’ privacy and effective advertising using cryptographic primitives. It was really great to finally be able to attend a conference in person after so long! Although the pandemic has led to many conferences being held onl

It is no surprise that in 2022 fears around cyber incidents potentially impacting elections run high. Since the 2016 interference reports against the US presidential election, concerns over cyber threats to the electoral system have been on the rise around the world. And Colombia is no different. With the legislative elections having passed in March, and the first round of the presidential elections due in May, Colombians have been seeing a stream of warnings from media outlets of possible cyber incidents . In February, during a speech given at a Plenary Session of the European Parliament, Colombian President Iván Duque discussed the need for Colombia to “ be able to protect its democracy against external influence or interference, [and] of those who intend to manipulate algorithms or those who intend to generate hatred and division” [1]. By early March the National Registrar, Alexander Vega, revealed that the National Civil Registry website had seen 400,000 cyber-attack attempts