Shehar Bano

I am a Research Scientist in Novi (Facebook) based in London. I am also a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Univeristy of Cambridge. My research interests centre on networked and distributed systems, particularly in the context of security and performance. My key areas of research include blockchains, information control (censorship & discrimination), Internet measurement, and malware and intrusion detection.

I was a co-founder and senior researcher at Chainspace, a scalable smart contracts platform, before I moved to Novi. I worked on the security, performance and applications of blockchains as a postdoc with George Danezis and Sarah Meiklejohn as part of the EU DECODE and EPSRC Glass Houses projects. I received my Ph.D. degree (Characterization of Internet Censorship from Multiple Perspectives) from the University of Cambridge in 2017 under the supervision of Jon Crowcroft (and co-supervised by Steven Murdoch, Vern Paxson, and Ross Anderson). I collaborated with ICSI (UC Berkeley), and made research contributions to NSF projects on developing empirical basis for censorship and socio-economic perspectives on Internet security. I also worked on Intrusion Detection Systems (Bro), and wrote an open-source software for botnet detection (BotFlex). I received my Master's degree in Computer and Communication Security from National University of Science and Technology, Pakistan in 2013.