PhD Defense - Security and Privacy of Blockchain Protocols and Applications - Sergei Tikhomirov
Channel: Sergei Tikhomirov
Date: 2020-09-21

Defending my PhD thesis at the University of Luxembourg on 17 September 2020.

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1olqh-w25ONJcn069Zedm0_n-4A8jm-zJXdUd7DCGNaY/edit?usp=sharing

Thesis: https://hdl.handle.net/10993/44424

01:52 Presentation starts
02:08 Introduction and motivation
12:26 Transaction clustering in Bitcoin and privacy-focused cryptocurrencies
27:46 Security and privacy of the Lightning network
44:57 Q&A session starts
45:30 Andrew Miller: comparison with prior work about network-level deanonymization
50:54 Andrew Miller: where do the examples for the weight function come from?
51:22 Andrew Miller: comparison with prior work about the Lightning network
52:40 Andrew Miller: is wormhole attack really an attack?
58:00 Patrick McCorry: likelihood of false positives in transaction clustering
1:01:28 Patrick McCorry: using the clustering method to discover Bitcoin P2P topology
1:03:52 Patrick McCorry: transactions broadcast from centralized wallets
1:05:08 Patrick McCorry: related work on the Lightning network
1:05:48 Patrick McCorry: rapid micropayments, Interledger, HTLCs considered harmful
1:08:22 Arthur Gervais: follow-up on rapid micropayments
1:09:03 Arthur Gervais: how many connections were established?
1:13:15 Arthur Gervais: how does the number of attacker's connections affect privacy?
1:14:45 Arthur Gervais: the role of an ISP in networking attacks
1:15:47 Arthur Gervais: how much does Lightning topology matter for privacy?
1:18:30 Matteo Maffei: effectiveness of countermeasures for network analysis
1:21:15 Matteo Maffei: potential complete redesign of Bitcoin's P2P layer
1:24:28 Matteo Maffei: cross-layer deanonymization attacks
1:27:15 Alex Biryukov: plans for future research
1:29:46 Volker Müller: which wallet do you recommend?
1:32:53 Volker Müller: interest from the financial industry in Luxembourg?
1:35:00 Arthur Gervais: has the security of Ethereum smart contract improved?
1:37:37 Patrick McCorry: why P2P connection is a privacy criterion?
1:37:46 Patrick McCorry: Samourai wallet and RPC connection to remote full node
1:42:27 Patrick McCorry: potential attacks on Bitcoin DNS seeds
1:44:50 Matteo Maffei: results of SmartCheck compared to other tools