RHUL Cyber CDT Blog

 By Jessica Mcclearn      After a long winter of writing my PhD thesis, I was very happy to wake up and drink espressos in the early morning sunshine of Barcelona for a much-needed caffeine boost before heading to the ACM CHI conference for a week! The ACM conference on Computer-Human Interaction is the largest conference in the field, with over 5000 in-person attendees over five days. The main reason I attended CHI this year was to support a co-author during their presentation of our work on help-seeking for fraud and scams, a research project we worked on together while interning at Google in the NYC office. Through an analysis of 405 Reddit posts, we explored the motivations and hooks for scam engagement before delineating how people seek help for scams across different stages. We did so by developing a taxonomy of scam types and then analysing scammers' emotional and technical tactics for engaging targets. We expanded prior frameworks in HCI literature and sugg...

 This past December, I was honoured to attend Asiacrypt 2025 in Melbourne, Australia. As one of the three flagship conferences organized by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), the event serves as a top venue for peer-reviewing and showcasing the most significant advancements in the field of cryptography. The 2025 program featured a rigorous selection of papers, with a notable emphasis on lattice-based cryptography, symmetric encryption, advanced cryptography, etc. Beyond theoretical perspective, the conference also highlighted various practical applications, including secure messaging and real-world implementations. After a 21-hour journey, I landed in Melbourne. I’ve always felt a deep connection to this city because I completed my master's at Monash University - also one of the event organizers, yet I had never actually been to Australia. Due to the pandemic, my studies were entirely remote. It took three years after my graduation, but I finally mad...

 By Mikaela Brough (CDT in CyberSecurity 2022) From December 11–12, I attended the Cryptology and Social Life Workshop in Trondheim, hosted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). I was drawn to this workshop because the attendees comprised a unique academic mix — those whose work touches on, or is at least informed to some extent by, an interest in the socio-political and cultural implications of cryptographic technologies. Among the attendees were both social scientists (e.g., design anthropologists and sociologists) and cryptographers. What made the workshop distinctive was not only the topics of the talks, but the format itself. Each keynote was followed by extended small-group discussions, deliberately set up to bring together people from different disciplinary backgrounds. The result of this was not just a series of presentations, but in-depth conversations across fields that do not always share the same assumptions, methods, or vocabularies.  In my...

  The annual IEEE Quantum Week is one of the largest global convocations of quantum technology researchers, developers, and policymakers from across government, industry, and academia. Its sixth iteration, held from 31 August–5 September 2025 in Albuquerque, New Mexico (USA) reflected a mood of accelerating interest and hype around the quantum technologies domain, with especial focus on quantum computing, quantum algorithms, and quantum communications. The last decade has been a transformative one for the maturing of quantum technologies from theoretical curiosities to early-stage commercially experimental applications, and real and important progress has been made across this time. But practical utility is still sharply limited : great hopes and grand claims about the future capabilities of quantum computers in particular run freely in the investment space around quantum technologies, but the actual capacity of current quantum computers—even those publicly available via quantu...