Recently I was part of a collaboration on Mixcoin, a set of proposals for improving Bitcoin’s anonymity. A natural question to ask is: why do this research? Before I address that, an even more basic question is whether or not Bitcoin is already anonymous. You may have seen back-and-forth arguments on this question. So which […]
Archives for 2014
Mesh Networks Won't Fix Internet Security
April 22, 2014 by
There’s no doubt that the quality of tech reporting in major newspapers has improved in recent years. It’s rare these days to see a story in, say, the New York Times whose fundamental technical premise is wrong. Still, it does happen occasionally—as it did yesterday. Yesterday’s Times ran a story gushing about mesh networks as […]
Eternal vigilance is a solvable technology problem: A proposal for streamlined privacy alerts
April 21, 2014 by
Consider three recent news articles about online privacy: Google+ added a new feature that shows view counts on everything you post, including your photos. It’s enabled by default, but if you don’t want to be part of the popularity contest, there’s a setting to turn it off. There is a new privacy tool called XPrivacy […]
Bitcoin hacks and thefts: The underlying reason
April 15, 2014 by
Emin Gün Sirer has a fascinating post about how the use of NoSQL caused technical failures that led to the demise of Bitcoin exchanges Flexcoin and Poloniex. But these are only the latest in a long line of hacks of exchanges, other services, and individuals; a wide variety of bugs have been implicated. This suggests […]
Heartbleed and passwords: don't panic
April 11, 2014 by
The Heartbleed bug has captured public attention this week like few security vulnerabilities before it. This is a good thing, as indeed this is a catastrophic flaw. Many people have focused on its impact on passwords with headlines like “Security Flaw Exposes Millions Of Passwords” and “Change these passwords right now.” Heartbleed certainly could have been used […]
