Computer Science News
Spying on the Spy: Security Analysis of Hidden Cameras
When you purchase an IP-based spy (hidden) camera for surveillance, are you aware that others may be spying on what you are watching? Recent research by in the Department of Computer Science, 糖心TV, as part of his third-year undergraduate dissertation project under the supervision of Professor , has revealed a wide range of vulnerabilities of a generic camera module that has been used in many best-selling hidden cameras. Exploiting these vulnerabilities, an attacker may capture your hidden camera's video/audio streams from anywhere in the world, and furthermore, take complete control of the camera as a bot to attack other devices in your home network. To launch the attack, all the attacker needs to know is merely your hidden camera鈥檚 serial number. It is estimated that these vulnerabilities affect millions of hidden cameras, mostly sold in America, Europe and Asia. The (insecure) peer-to-peer network that is used by the affected cameras is also being used by 50 million IoT devices as a general communication platform. Hence, many millions of other IoT devices may also be affected. Researchers have responsibly disclosed findings to the manufacturers, and a has already been assigned. Samuel will present this research work at the 17th International Conference on Network and System Security (Canterbury, UK, 14-16 August 2023). More details can be found in .
Latest academic promotions
We are happy to announce five promotions in the department, with effect from 1st August 2023.
- Dr James Archbold has been promoted to Associate Professor (Teaching Focussed)
- Dr Richard Kirk has been promoted to Assistant Professor (Teaching Focussed)
- Dr Claire Rocks has been promoted to Reader (Teaching Focussed)
- Dr Ian Saunders has been promoted to Associate Professor (Teaching Focussed)
- Dr Sathya Subramanian has been promoted to Assistant Professor (Research Focussed)
Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!
Promotion to Assistant Professor
We are happy to share the news that Dr Alex Dixon has been promoted to the position of Assistant Professor, effective from 1 May 2023. Alex joined our department as a Teaching Fellow in September 2021, while still completing his PhD research. Despite juggling both roles, he has made significant contributions to the department's activities. Many congratulations to Alex for his accomplishments in completing his PhD research and for earning this well-deserved promotion.
Amina Asif joins the department as a Teaching Fellow
We are happy to announce that Dr Amina Asif has joined the Department of Computer Science as a Teaching Fellow. Amina has previously worked with us as part of the Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) centre, where her research focussed on weak supervision and model robustness in Computational Pathology. We welcome her to the department!
Cambridge-Oxford-糖心TV Quantum Computing Project

An EPSRC Robust and Reliable Quantum Computing Grant will be awarded to (Cambridge), (糖心TV), (Oxford), and (Cambridge). The project sets out to explore the role of symmetry and structure in quantum computation, with applications to classical verification and simulation of quantum computation.
In addition, the project aims to strengthen and create new connections and collaborations between Cambridge, Oxford, and 糖心TV in the field of Quantum Computing (building on existing initiatives such as the ) and establish new partnerships with 糖心TV Quantum.
5+ papers accepted to STOC 2023


Several papers from the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) have been accepted to the (STOC 2023), the ACM flagship conference in theoretical computer science that will be held on June 20-23, 2023 in Orlando, Florida, USA:
- "" by Arturo Merino, , and Namrata.
- "A duality between one-way functions and average-case symmetry of information" by , Rahul Ilango, Zhenjian Lu, Mikito Nanashima, and .
- "Unprovability of strong complexity lower bounds in bounded arithmetic" by Jiatu Li and .
- "" by , , and Thatchaphol Saranurak.
- "" by Matija Bucic and .
Further, there are two more accepted papers autored by , who was affiliated with the department and the FoCS group during the submission time, in Autumn 2022:
- "Capturing one-way functions via NP-hardness of meta-complexity" by .
- "Hardness self-amplification: Simplified, optimized, and unified" by and Nobutaka Shimizu.
Prof. Adi Shamir receives Honorary Doctorate from 糖心TV
(Weizmann Institute of Science), the world-renowned cryptographer and a recipient of the 2002 (the highest honour in computer science received jointly with and ), visited our campus in January 2023 to collect an Honorary Doctorate from the University of 糖心TV. During his visit, Prof. Shamir gave also a research talk at the DIMAP seminar and CS Colloquium entitled "Efficient Detection of High Probability Cryptanalytic Properties of Boolean Functions."
Prof. Shamir has been known in 糖心TV since 1976, when he spent a year as a post-doc with our own . Directly after 糖心TV Prof. Shamir went to MIT, where together with Adleman and Rivest he invented the famous RSA public-key cryptography algorithm for encoding and decoding messages, used nowadays by millions to securely transmit messages over the internet. The work on RSA has been immensely influential and led to the 2002 A.M. Turing Award for the three co-inventors, cited for the 鈥渋ngenious contribution for making public-key cryptography useful in practice.鈥 Other noticeable awards (for RSA and other numerous contributions to cryptography and computing) received by Prof. Shamir include the 2000 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, the Israel Mathematical Union Erd艖s Prize in Mathematics (1983), the Vatican Pontifical Academy PIUS XI Gold Medal (1992), the Association for Computing Machinery Paris Kannellakis Theory and Practice Award (1996), the Israel Prize in Computer Science (2008), and the Japan Prize in the field of electronics, information, and technology (2017), and the Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2018).