March 19, 2024

Cross-Layer Security: A Holistic View of Internet Security 

By Henry Birge-Lee, Liang Wang, Grace Cimaszewski, Jennifer Rexford and Prateek Mittal On February 3, 2022, attackers launched a highly effective attack against the Korean cryptocurrency exchange KLAYswap. We discussed the details of this attack in our earlier blog post “Attackers exploit fundamental flaw in the web’s security to steal $2 million in cryptocurrency.” However, […]

Dcentral vs. Consensus: Are institutions “frens” or enemies of crypto?

As a part of an ethnographic study on blockchain organizations, I recently attended two major conferences – Dcentral Con and Consensus – held back-to-back in Austin, Texas during a blistering heatwave. My collaborator, Johannes Lenhard, and I had conducted a handful of interviews with angel investors, founders, and venture capitalists, but we’d yet to conduct […]

The Trust Architecture of Blockchain: Kevin Werbach at CITP

Rather than removing the need for trust, blockchain offers a new architecture of trust, according to Kevin Werbach, today’s speaker at CITP.

What’s new with BlockSci, Princeton’s blockchain analysis tool

Six months ago we released the initial version of BlockSci, a fast and expressive tool to analyze public blockchains. In the accompanying paper we explained how we used it to answer scientific questions about security, privacy, miner behavior, and economics using blockchain data. BlockSci has a number of other applications including forensics and as an […]

Blockchain: What is it good for?

Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are surrounded by world-historic levels of hype and snake oil. For people like me who take the old-fashioned view that technical claims should be backed by sound arguments and evidence, it’s easy to fall into the trap of concluding that there is no there there–and that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are fundamentally useless. […]