[Joe Calandrino is a veteran of Freedom to Tinker and CITP. As long time readers will remember, he did his Ph.D. here, advised by Ed Felten. He recently joined the FTC as research director of OTech, the Office of Technology Research and Investigation. Today we have an exciting announcement. — Arvind Narayanan.] Arvind Narayanan and […]
Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services
April 14, 2016 by
[This is a guest post by Vitaly Shmatikov, professor at Cornell Tech and once upon a time my adviser at the University of Texas at Austin. — Arvind Narayanan.] TL;DR: short URLs produced by bit.ly, goo.gl, and similar services are so short that they can be scanned by brute force. Our scan discovered a large […]
Classified material in the public domain: what's a university to do?
October 8, 2015 by
Yesterday I posted some thoughts about Purdue University’s decision to destroy a video recording of my keynote address at its Dawn or Doom colloquium. The organizers had gone dark, and a promised public link was not forthcoming. After a couple of weeks of hoping to resolve the matter quietly, I did some digging and decided […]
Threshold signatures for Bitcoin wallets are finally here
March 8, 2015 by
Today we are pleased to release our paper presenting a new ECDSA threshold signature scheme that is particularly well-suited for securing Bitcoin wallets. We teamed up with cryptographer Rosario Gennaro to build this scheme. Threshold signatures can be thought of as “stealth multi-signatures.”
Consensus in Bitcoin: One system, many models
December 26, 2014 by
At a technical level, the Bitcoin protocol is a clever solution to the consensus problem in computer science. The idea of consensus is very general — a number of participants together execute a computation to come to agreement about the state of the world, or a subset of it that they’re interested in. Because of […]
