Category: Privacy & Security
-
Secure protocols for accountable warrant execution
Last week the press reported that the White House will seek to redesign the NSA’s mass phone call data program, so that data will be held by the phone companies and accessed by the NSA, subject to a new warrant requirement. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will issue the warrants. Today Josh Kroll and I,…
-
New research: Better wallet security for Bitcoin
[UPDATE (April 3, 2014): We’ve found an error in our paper. In the threshold signature scheme that we used, there are restrictions on the threshold value. In particular if the key is shared over a degree t polynomial, then 2t+1 players (not t+1) are required to to construct a signature. We thought that this could…
-
Why Dorian Nakamoto Probably Isn't Satoshi
When Newsweek published its cover story last week claiming to have identified the creator of Bitcoin, I tweeted that I was reserving judgment on their claim, pending more evidence. At this point it looks like they don’t have more evidence to show us—and that Newsweek is probably wrong.
-
9 Problems of Government Hacking: Why IT-Systems Deserve Constitutional Protection
Governments around the world are increasingly hacking into IT-systems. But for every apparent benefit, government hacking creates deeper problems. Time to unpack 9 of them, and to discuss one unique perspective: in response to a proposed hacking law in 2008, the German Constitutional Court created a new human right protecting the ‘confidentiality and integrity of…
-
Are User Identification Networks the Future of Commercial Bitcoin Transactions?
With 12.3 million bitcoins mined to date, the total value of bitcoins has reached $9.975 billion US dollars. While this may pale in comparison to the $1.23 trillion US dollars in circulation, the use of bitcoins in commerce is gaining traction. With this traction the potential exists to link users’ identities with their public bitcoin…
-
Understanding Bitcoin's transaction malleability problem
In recent days, several Bitcoin exchanges have suspended certain kinds of payments due to “transaction malleability” issues. There has been a lot of talk about why this happened, and some finger-pointing. In this post, I will try to unpack what “transaction malleability” is and why it has proven to be a problem for some companies.
-
It matters what the NSA does
It seems axiomatic that if we want to have an informed conversation about the legality, ethics, and policy implications of the NSA’s actions, it is useful to know what the NSA is doing. Yet a vocal subset of NSA defenders seem to be taking the contrary position, that information about the agency’s activities serves no…
-
NSA call data analysis: inside or outside government?
Last week the President suggested that the NSA’s database of phone call data be stored outside the government, and he asked his Administration to study how this could be done. Today I’d like to start unpacking the options.
-
Can Washington re-architect the NSA phone data program?
In the President’s NSA reform speech last week, he called for a study of how to re-architect the NSA’s phone call data program, to change where the data is stored. This raises a bunch of interesting computer science questions, which I’m planning to explore in a series of posts here.