Some 50 millions of dollars have been stolen from DAO token holders (including myself). The DAO is by the way, claimed to be closing [Tual]. Closing or not, it remains a smart contract which should allow DAO holders to get some of their initial ethers back. Now can the thief spend his Ethers without being caught (for now locked until 14 …
A major paper trying to explain why security experts have so frequently failed. Cormac Herley: The Unfalsifiability of Security Claims paper /slides. It starts with a great classic, Karl Popper philosophy of science which would be the basis to say “security” is some sort of pseudo-science. We read that “there is no empirical test that allows us …
For decades the dominant paradigm in crypto and security research would be: to claim that security vulnerabilities occur accidentally, ignoring major questions such as why there are so many of them and why the “bad scenarios” repeat so many times, concentrate security research on topics of secondary importance, or those which have no importance whatsoever and …
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In the last 2 weeks it was possible to buy DAO tokens, a major new form of distributed business constructed to run on ETH blockchain. Until Friday 12 May 2016 some 50 M$ were invested. Then the price of these tokens has started raising [following the pre-determined rule] for the last 2 weeks of token …
On the V-Day and the 71st anniversary of defeating the Nazi Germany, we should remember how much the victory is owed to code breakers at Bletchley Park and elsewhere. 2016 UCL Code Breaking Competition (part of GA18). On this day it is my pleasure to announce the winners of the 2016 UCL Code Breaking competition. The winners …
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Hours after his TV interview and his coming out in The Economist and elsewhere, I can confirm beyond reasonable doubt that Craig Wright (CW) has cheated us about his ability to sign messages with Satoshi’s private key. Here is a short executive summary of facts guaranteed to be 100% exact.This is also a short and …
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Today the Economist publishes a picture of Craig Wright, who decided to confirm and embrace the claim that he is the mysterious creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. The picture and the paper portrays a sad man who is badly struggling “to convince the world that he is indeed who he claims to be”. He also …
The press is full of reports about a new discovery about prime numbers. Consecutive prime numbers do NOT like to end by the same digit mod q. For example the probability that the difference of two consecutive prime numbers close to x is divisible by 3 is different than 1/2 one might very naively expect. It …
New paper about in what ways bitcoin will fail when cryptography is broken.
With help of some sponsors and friends, and from donations received in UCL seminar donation account, I have created a fund for research prizes for beginning researchers in bitcoin and blockchain security, financial cryptography and real-life cryptanalysis. Here is our press release (updated 10 March 2015). Confirmed sponsors are Blockchain.com, Clearmatics, …
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