Identity theftUsing Bitcoin to prevent identity theft
A reaction to the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin is a digital-currency scheme designed to wrest control of the monetary system from central banks. With Bitcoin, anyone can mint money, provided he or she can complete a complex computation quickly enough. Through a set of clever protocols, that computational hurdle prevents the system from being coopted by malicious hackers. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory presented a new system that uses Bitcoin’s security machinery to defend against online identity theft. The system piggybacks on the digital currency’s security protocols to thwart hijacked servers.
Bitcoin may contains greater security than convential currencies // Source: theconversation.com
A reaction to the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin is a digital-currency scheme designed to wrest control of the monetary system from central banks. With Bitcoin, anyone can mint money, provided he or she can complete a complex computation quickly enough. Through a set of clever protocols, that computational hurdle prevents the system from being coopted by malicious hackers.
At the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy last week, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory presented a new system that uses Bitcoin’s security machinery to defend against online identity theft.
“Our paper is about using Bitcoin to prevent online services from getting away with lying,” says Alin Tomescu, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the paper. “When you build systems that are distributed and send each other digital signatures, for instance, those systems can be compromised, and they can lie. They can say one thing to one person and one thing to another. And we want to prevent that.”
An attacker who hacked a public-key encryption system, for instance, might “certify” — or cryptographically assert the validity of — a false encryption key, to trick users into revealing secret information. But it couldn’t also decertify the true key without setting off alarms, so there would be two keys in circulation bearing certification from the same authority. The new system, which Tomescu developed together with his thesis advisor, Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, defends against such “equivocation.”
Because Bitcoin is completely decentralized, the only thing ensuring its reliability is a massive public log — referred to as the blockchain — of every Bitcoin transaction conducted since the system was first introduced in 2009. Earlier systems have used the Bitcoin machinery to guard against equivocation, but for verification, they required the download of the entire blockchain, which is 110 gigabytes and growing hourly. Tomescu and Devadas’ system, by contrast, requires the download of only about 40 megabytes of data, so it could run on a smartphone.
