Another theft in a series: nearly 2 millions of dollars are missing from the BTER exchange. A specific transaction created by the thief can be found here. The theft took place on 14 Feb 2015. [added later] Another theft of some 250,000 USD has occurred at another Chinese exchange on 27 Jan 2015. Here some Internet posts …
A wind of change is blowing inside the bitcoin community. For many many years the dominant ideology in bitcoin community was that open source software such as bitcoin is “secure”, and that you need to trust the infinite wisdom of the crowd who will find all the bugs and fix them, the wisdom of the …
Continue reading ‘The Era of Irresponsibility Is Coming to An End?’ »
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Nobody yet knows how 5 million of dollars in bitcoins were stolen from bitstamp (reported on 5 Jan 2015). One expert report by Ferrin can be found here, however it is not clear if anybody knows at all HOW these bitcoins have been stolen. The bitcoin address of the thief is also known. Possibly bitcoin …
Continue reading ‘Speculation About The New Theft – 5 Million Dollars Stolen’ »
It appears that at least 100,000 USD were recently stolen from Blockchain.info wallets. Then a lot more was stolen again as reported on 15 Dec. Let us try to get make sure that we understand these events properly. Historical Background Bad random events in the blockchain have been known since January 2013. We have written on this …
Continue reading ‘Now At Least 200,000 USD Stolen From Blockchain.Info Wallets’ »
Bad random events are still happening in the bitcoin blockchain, such events are observed on a regular basis. They are probably due to some yet unpatched software (cf. section Mitigation Points here). Here is the latest such event at the moment of writing, it has occurred on 29 November 2014, see here. Two different bitcoin …
All cryptographers understand the difference between a standard elliptic curve which everybody uses and recommends (say NIST, NSA, NATO, Microsoft, EMV bank cards etc) and a bizarre elliptic curve which nobody ever uses and which no responsible crypto engineer would recommend, except strangely in bitcoin. How to Upgrade It would be incredibly easy to upgrade, …
Continue reading ‘How To Upgrade The Bitcoin Elliptic Curve’ »
So many times we have learned about cryptography and security the hard way. One of the key problems is ignoring the advice and warnings, which are plainly written in the current crypto literature. This without the slightest ambiguity, so that there is very little doubt about what a reasonable and professional security practice is. The Story …
Continue reading ‘Controversy Around Bitcoin Elliptic Curve’ »
There is a wave of new powerful cryptographic attacks on bitcoin systems. There are several types of attacks: Attacks which use poor random number events. It has already happened hundreds of times in the bitcoin blockchain since 2012. Now there is a recent massive outbreak of such events. Here is a recent example from 1 Nov …
Continue reading ‘New Powerful Attacks On ECDSA In Bitcoin Systems’ »
A paper at the Financial Cryptography 2012 conference explained that Bitcoin is a system which “uses no fancy cryptography, and is by no means perfect”. Cryptography can do much better than that. Now what kind of bitcoin cryptographers are going to build? Most current proposals are about making anonymous unlinkable untraceable etc etc currency. This is a …