Security Theater Seminar, Sun 29/Jan/2012 at 14:00 - Breaking Bitcoin [at Kitot 011! Note location!]
Yossef Oren
Electrical Engineering Classroom Building (חשמל כיתות), Room 011 [note location] Join us virtually!
Sunday, January 29, 2:00pm
Bitcoin: An analysis
Abstract: Bitcoin is the first distributed, digital currency. It received a lot of attention recently as it questions the state monopoly to issue legal tender. It relies on distributed proof-of-work concepts to ensure money-like characteristics.
The existence and potential widespread use of such a distributed, non-centralized, non-regulated currency questions the ability of governments to control money supply, issue debt, and tax its populace.
Transactions in bitcoin form a publicly accessible network of economic relations, which can be extracted from the transaction history available to all users in the P2P-network of bitcoin.
Using re-identification algorithms it is possible to attack the proposed anonymity of users. While this is already an interesting security issue, the insight into a real-world economic experiment allows for the first time the empirical test of community structures in such social networks, which is definitely more substantial than the "I-like"-network in facebook and the like.
In this presentation, we show results on network analysis of the money flow, the behavior of individuals, and the overall scalability of P2P-currencies. At the same time we will discuss advanced "financial instruments" that one might find in the transactions.
Speaker Bio: Stefan Katzenbeisser is director of the Security Engineering Group, Computer Science Department, Technische Universität Darmstadt. Recorded at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress (28C3), Berlin Germany, on September 27, 2011 http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4746.en.htmlFor more information about the Security Theater, please visit: http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/~consel/SecurityTheater