Bitcoin and the Security of the Blockchain

Speaker: Marc Stevens

Abstract

Bitcoin is the world's first decentralized digital currency and an ongoing experiment. The real power of Bitcoin lies in its underlying decentralized ledger, the blockchain. In this talk I will explain the security model of the blockchain and discuss various security aspects around Bitcoin.

Biography

Marc Stevens is a cryptanalyst and tenure-track researcher at the Cryptology Group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam. He obtained his PhD in 2012 from the Mathematical Institute, Leiden University, for which he was awarded the KHMW (The Royal Holland Society of Sciences) Martinus van Marum prize.

Marc is an expert in hash function cryptanalysis, with emphasis on practical attacks on MD5 and SHA-1. Research highlights are the construction of the MD5 rogue Certification Authority in 2008, the reconstruction of the cryptanalytic attack in the supermalware Flame using counter-cryptanalysis in 2012, and the free-start collision for SHA-1 in 2015.