16 Dec 2015

The final project reports and sites are now posted: Project Reports

7 Dec 2015

The Evolution of Bitcoin Script Interpreter (Acacia Dai) A Bandwidth Based Proof of Work (Alishan Hassan) Bitcoin at Point of Sale (Elizabeth Kukla) Vending on Dark Net Markets (Collin Berman) Donation Accountability (Kienan Adams) Understanding Mobile Bitcoin Wallet (Ziqi Liu) BitSniffer: a Tool for Linkability Analysis (Ryan Anderson, Sam Prestwood, Luke Gessler) Taking Down Silk Road (Gardner Fiveash) How Much is Bitcoin Worth: Pricing Differences Across Exchanges and Time (Quentin Moore) Analysis of the viability of Bitcoin replacing as a National Currency (Peter Leng) Evaluating BlockCyphers Confidence Level (Dean Makovsky and Joseph Tobin and Kevin Zhao and Vignesh Kuppusamy)

2 Dec 2015

Developing a Distributed Distributed Consensus Protocol Consensus Protocol (Alec Grieser) Blockchain Voting (Sugat Poudel, Austin J. Varshneya, Xhama Vyas) BitMingle (Carter Hall, Reid Bixler) Beyond the Lightning Network - Exploring How to Scale Bitcoin (Muthu Chidambaram) Mixing with Miners (Morgan Locks) Pruning Nodes (Cyrus Malekpour) Bitcoin Block-size Options (Michael Parisi Presicce) Bitcoin Controversy and Conflicts of Interest (Jacob Freck) Detecting Selfish Mining in Bitcoin and Litecoin (Fangyang Cui) Geopolitical Strategy and Bitcoin (Eashan Kaw)

30 Nov 2015

Wednesday, 2 Dec and Monday 7 Dec: Final Project Presentations. See Class 25 for schedule.

These people are scheduled to present Wednesday: Alec Grieser, (Sugat Poudel, Austin J. Varshneya, Xhama Vyas), (Carter Hall, Reid Bixler), Muthu Chidambaram, Morgan Locks, Cyrus Malekpour, Michael Parisi Presicce, Jacob Freck, Fangyang Cui, Eashan Kaw, Cody Robertson.

Dont forget to send the link to your presentation before 11:59am on the day you are presenting!

Office hours: normal office hours will continue until December 11: Mondays 5-6:30pm (Ori in Rice 442), Wednesdays after class (Samee in Rice 442), Thursdays 2:30-3:30 (Dave in Rice 507).

Friday, 4 December, 3:30pm in Rice 130: Department of Computer Science, Distinguished Alumni Seminar Series

MAKING SECURITY USABLE (FOR A BILLION USERS)

How do you know if a website is safe? The security community puts enormous effort into detecting malware, stopping the next Heartbleed, and sandboxing bad content. Google Chromes usable security team sits at the front end of this work: we build the UI that tells end users whats going on with their privacy and security. What you see as a single icon might be the end product of months of work by engineers, designers, security experts, and user researchers. Ill explain some of the engineering and design challenges that we face, and give insight into the day-by-day work done by a security team that serves more than a billion browser users.

Bio: Adrienne Porter Felt leads Google Chromes usable security team, whose goal is to help people make safe decisions while using Chrome. Along with her team, Dr. Felt is responsible for building and improving the security warnings, indicators, and settings that you see in Chrome today. Previously, Dr. Felt was a research scientist on Googles security research team, where she examined how browser users react to security warnings. She received a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley, and a BS from the University of Virginia in 2008.

Monday, 7 December (11:59pm): Project Final Reports. See Class 25 for details.

The slides below include all the Jeopardy questions, even ones we didnt get to in class. You shouldnt expect to get asked trivia questions in the oral final exam (and will not be asked to phrase your answers in the form of a question!), but some of the substantive questions here would make good questions to ask during the exam (in particular, Id recommend looking at the unused questions in Unlocking Script and Crypto Curves as good potential exam questions).

23 Nov 2015

Wednesday, 2 Dec and Monday 7 Dec: Final Project Presentations (see below).

Monday, 7 December (11:59pm): Project Final Reports (see below)

Understanding Mobile Bitcoin Wallet Ziqi Liu

Visual Explorer for Addresses and their Relations Ryan Anderson, Sam Prestwood, Luke Gessler

How Much is Bitcoin Worth: Pricing Differences Across Exchanges and Time Quentin Moore

Analysis of the viability of Bitcoin replacing as a National Currency Peter Leng

Beyond the Lightning Network - Exploring How to Scale Bitcoin Muthu Chidambaram

Mixing with Miners Morgan Locks

Bitcoin Block-size Options Michael Parisi Presicce

Bitcoin Controversy and Conflicts of Interest Jacob Freck

Understanding Takedowns Gardner Fiveash

Detecting Selfish Mining in Bitcoin and Litecoin Fangyang Cui

Geopolitical Strategy and Bitcoin Eashan Kaw

Evaluating BlockCyphers Confidence Level Dean Makovsky and Joseph Tobin and Kevin Zhao and Vignesh Kuppusamy

Pruning Nodes Cyrus Malekpour

Divergence of Alt Coins and their Concurrent Developments Cody Robertson

A Bandwidth Based Proof of Work Alishan Hassan

Developing a Distributed Distributed Consensus Protocol Consensus Protocol Alec Grieser

The Evolution of Bitcoin Script Interpreter Acacia Dai

The final project presentations will be in class on Wednesday, 2 December and Monday, 7 December. The presentation will count for approximately 50% of the grade for your final project.

The schedule of the presentations is below. Each team will have 5 + (N - 1) minutes to present your project (where N is the number of team members; so a 4-person team will have 8 minutes). Your presentation should be well prepared and enthusiastically delivered!

You should send a link to your presentation (PDF, PowerPoint, or anything that works in Firefox browser) to ccc-staff before 11:59am on the day you are scheduled to present. If your presentation includes a demo thats great, but it needs to be designed in a way that can be set up quickly and used effectively.

Wednesday, 2 December: Developing a Distributed Distributed Consensus Protocol Consensus Protocol (Alec Grieser) Blockchain Voting (Sugat Poudel, Austin J. Varshneya, Xhama Vyas) Distributed Bitcoin Mixing with Interest (Carter Hall, Reid Bixler) Beyond the Lightning Network - Exploring How to Scale Bitcoin (Muthu Chidambaram) Mixing with Miners (Morgan Locks) Pruning Nodes (Cyrus Malekpour) Bitcoin Block-size Options (Michael Parisi Presicce) Bitcoin Controversy and Conflicts of Interest (Jacob Freck) Detecting Selfish Mining in Bitcoin and Litecoin (Fangyang Cui) Geopolitical Strategy and Bitcoin (Eashan Kaw) Divergence of Alt Coins and their Concurrent Developments (Cody Robertson)

Monday, 7 December: The Evolution of Bitcoin Script Interpreter (Acacia Dai) A Bandwidth Based Proof of Work (Alishan Hassan) Bitcoin at Point of Sale (Elizabeth Kukla) Vending on Dark Net Markets (Collin Berman) Analyzing the Feasibility of a Donation Accountability System in Bitcoin (Kienan Adams) Understanding Mobile Bitcoin Wallet (Ziqi Liu) Visual Explorer for Addresses and their Relations (Ryan Anderson, Sam Prestwood, Luke Gessler) Understanding Takedowns (Gardner Fiveash) How Much is Bitcoin Worth: Pricing Differences Across Exchanges and Time (Quentin Moore) Analysis of the viability of Bitcoin replacing as a National Currency (Peter Leng) Evaluating BlockCyphers Confidence Level (Dean Makovsky and Joseph Tobin and Kevin Zhao and Vignesh Kuppusamy)

To submit your final report, send an email to ccc-staff@cs.virginia.edu with subject line Project Report: Title and cc-ing all of your team members. The official deadline for the final reports is Monday, 7 December (11:59pm), but extensions will be granted upon request so long as extending the deadline for this does not interfere problematically with your other courses and responsibilities.

The email should be plaintext containing:

A title for your project (this is the title I will use on the public page listing all the projects; add a * if it is different from the title currently listed on Project).

A one-sentence description of your project. This should be a clear, well-written sentence that will be enough for someone to understand what you did and why.

A URL that points to a publicly-viewable web page that describes your project. The linked page can (and probably should) contain links to other pages (e.g., a website that is your actual project or a github repo with your project code). For example, the link you send could be a link to http://my-project-site.org/about.html or https://github.com/your-repo/README.md, which is a page describing your project, as well as containing links to the main project site. Please try to put your project site somewhere that will not expire when you graduate from UVa, but that can survive forever.

Your project report, either as a PDF attachment, or a URL. Your project report should be a well-written and readable paper about your project. For most projects, this should include at least: (1) the motivation for your project, (2) background, including a description of related work (with references), (3) explanation of what you did, and (4) your results. For projects that do not involve building something, it may make more sense for it to be a more integrated report.

By the end of this week, everyone should receive an email with your status in the class (including feedback on PS3).

The main message of this email will be guidance as to whether or not you should schedule a final exam. The main options are:

Youre well positioned to get an A in the class. So long as you do a decent job on the project, youll get an A and dont need to do the final exam.

You are approaching what you need to do to convince us you deserve an A in the class, but need do more. If your project is outstanding, that may be enough to make the case. If not, youll have a last chance to do so by doing a final exam.

From what youve done so far, were not convinced you understand cryptocurrencies well enough to earn an A in the class. You should plan on doing a final exam to convince us otherwise!

For students receving options 1 or 2, well try to give feedback on your final projects are quickly as possible so you know whether or not a final exam will be recommended.

The final exam will be an oral exam where you will explain how bitcoin works, and then answer a few follow-up questions. These will be scheduled during the scheduled final exam time (Friday, 11 December 2-5pm) and other times.

18 Nov 2015

Teams that did not present their project in class Wednesday, should be ready to present well on Monday!

Litecoin boasts faster confirmations (2.5 minutes as opposed to 10 minutes). Does this help you gain confidence in a given transaction faster (at which point it is unlikely to be double-spent)?

16 Nov 2015

Starting Wednesday and every following class: Be prepared to give an elevator pitch for your project. Your pitch should be no more than 2 minutes long. You may use visuals as long as you can obtain them by (quickly) entering a URL in a web browser. Your pitch should get across in a convincing and engaging way:

Monday, 23 November (8:29pm): Project Progress Reports. Send an email to ccc-staff@cs.virginia.edu, cc-ing all members of your project team. The email should have a subject line, Project:Title, with your project title. Its body should contain at least this information:

A link to the website for your project (this could be a github page if you want). That site should have a front page that describes your project, lists the team members, and provides more information about your project.

A short paragraph explaining how your project has changed since the preliminary proposal email. This should explain if the goals of your project have changed and why.

A description of what progress you have made on your project.

A description of what you plan to do to complete your project, and your plans for doing this. If you have a multi-person team, this should include an explanation of how your team is working together and who is doing what.

(optional) Any questions you have for us.

Vignesh raised a really good point about Chaums scheme which I misunderstood in class until he clarified it after, so Im posting an explanation here.

The issue he noticed is that if the bank knows all the possible I values (all the customer identities), and receives one of the identity split perimages, e.g., I1L, then the bank can search through all the identities to find an I1R such that h(I1R) matches the hash value. This is done by just xor-ing all the I values with I1L to find a guess for I1R, and then computing the hash to check if it is the right one. As I presented the scheme, this would be a big vulnerability! It violates the desired property that the bill spenders anonymity is protected (even from the bank) unless she attempts to spend the bill twice.

To defeat this, we need to ensure that the set of possible I values is not known (even to the bank). One way to do this would be to add some randomness in the I values used in the generated banknotes used in the cut-and-choose for the blind signatures. Each note with have a different I, but one the bank can verify is still the right account owner. Ill leave the details of how to do this as a challenge problem.

16 Nov 2015

This page should contain everyones submitted project idea. Well keep this updated as the projects develop, so please let us know if things change (you can also post comments on the page for updates).

The slides from Alex and Nicks presentation are now posted: Scaling Bitcoin and Web Bitcoin Blockchain 2.0.

12 Nov 2015

Last class, we talked about using Graph Isomorphism as the basis for a zero knowledge proof, based on the assumption that it is a computationally hard problem to determine if two graphs are isomorphic.

Yesterday, Laszlo Babai presented a result that claims a quasipolynomial time algorithm for graph isomorphism (that is, shows graph isomorphism is not a hard enough problem to use as the basis for a zero knowledge proof).

Jeremy Kuns summary of Babais presentation A Big Result on Graph Isomorphism

Note that this has no bearing on the zero knowledge proofs based on the hardness of graph three-coloring, which, unlike graph isomorphism, is know to be NP-Complete.

12 Nov 2015

As Cyrus and Collin mentioned in class yesterday, Special Agent Jeremy DErrico, who visited our class earlier in the semester, will be the guest speaker at the meeting of the UVa Computer and Network Security Club tonight (Thursday) at 7:00pm. Hell talk about Cryptowall malware and efforts to analyze and detect it.

The meeting will be in Thorton D223.

11 Nov 2015

Jean-Jacques Quisquater (Myriam, Muriel, Michael), Louis Guillou (Marie Annick, Gaid, Anna, Gwenole, Soazig), How to Explain Zero-Knowledge Protocols to Your Children. (Explains how zero-knowledge protocols work using a story about the Strange Cave of Ali Baba.)

Ben Sasson et al. Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin

Miers, I.; Garman, C.; Green, M.; Rubin, A.D. Zerocoin: Anonymous distributed e-cash from bitcoin

9 Nov 2015

The slides from Nick Skelsey and Alex Kucks presentation about ombuds are here: Scaling Bitcoin and Web Bitcoin Blockchain 2.0.

9 Nov 2015

Project Pre-Proposals are due Friday (November 13) at 8:29pm.

Your pre-proposal should include the following information:

Names of everyone on the project team - you may work on your own, or with any number of teammates. The expected impressiveness of your project should scale at least as the square root of the number of project members.

Title of your project - a short title that gets across what your project is about.

Idea for your project - one or two paragraphs that explain what the purpose of your project is and what you plan to do.

Expected outcome - what you hope will be the outcome of your project. This should explain what you expect to be able to deliver by the end of semester, and how the world will benefit from it.

Related work - list of projects (which could include papers, companies, etc.) that had goals related to yours. You do not have to have studied these in detail yet, but should have identified starting points to look at.

Immediate plans - what are the next steps you plan to do.

Please submit this as a plain text email to ccc-staff@cs.virginia.edu.

Your email should have as its subject line: Project: Title where Title is the title of your project. It should include all team members as ccd recipients. It should include your answers to the six points above, clearly numbered. Do not use any PDF attachments unless it is really necessary to provide a figure for your idea to be understandable.

4 Nov 2015

Mondays class will be a visit from Nick Skelsey and Alex Kuck of Ombuds!

Link:

Cryptocurrency Cabal