EB50 – BTC2B Conference: Nicolas Courtois & potential security vulnerabilities in Bitcoin ECDSA

Transcript

this episode of epicenter Bitcoin is brought to you by fairlay fairlay is a Bitcoin prediction Market where you can place predictions on the likelihood of sporting events the Bitcoin price or current affairs you earn money if your predictions are correct head over to fair.com epicenter that's F air ry.com epicenter to place your first bet today hi welcome to epicenter Bitcoin the show which talks about the technology projects and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency Revolution my name is Sebastiano and today's episode continues our coverage of the BTC 2B conference which took place in Brussels on October 16th and 17th so in this episode we have

the final Talk of the conference which was delivered by Nicola ctoa who is a well-known cryptographer codebreaker as well as a senior lecturer at the University College London he has over 100 Publications multiple patents and years of experience working in the The Smart Card industry in the last few years nikoda has shifted some of his time to city in cryptocurrencies he's authored several papers on bitcoin and is the author of the so-called theory of self-destruction of cryptocurrencies you can find nikolas's work and writings on his website at blog. better crypto.com so this talk is titled cryptographic security of ecdsa in Bitcoin in which nikoda exposes the security

vulnerabilities in the specific variation of the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm used in Bitcoin in fact he speculates that Bitcoin will be cracked sometime in 2015 it's a very technically complex talk but very interesting and opens your eyes to the possibility that the technology that we all use and want to succeed may have some serious security issues so for those of you who are interested the link to the slides for this talk will be in the show notes at epicenter bitcoin.com and you can of course read more of Nika's research on his website at blog.

better crypto.com and we'll try to get them on as soon as we can so that we can dive deeper into this topic so without further Ado here's [Music] nikol so I will um tell you about cryptographic security of Bitcoin focusing on CDs okay so um uh my profession is basically to break things so and cod breaker um so I have spent my whole life in this space I'm also a Bitcoin activist so I run a Bitcoin seminar in central London

and I have a Blog it's better crypto.com you can also Google for us us see a Bitcoin seminar runs every week so um well the question is is Bitcoin secure actually sat somewhat explicitly claim it is in his paper and on other places uh so I have done some research on 51% attacks okay so for example here some some some comments on my paper Okay cryptocurrencies are programmed to self-destruct Politically Incorrect news Stranger Than Fiction usually true okay a very very on

paper uh so my whole life I have tried to improve the security Baseline okay um I was basically crying wolf all the okay uh like 51% attack electric Cur openl few more today okay um it did not help okay the wolf was always allowed to operate okay um so we failed to protect our data okay and it's not so much about the NSA actually you know you have all these things which are behind the NSA here which really are the real

problem okay um we fail to protect our money okay so basically there is no reasonable way to store money in today's um economy basically okay you are a victim of some sort of you know very strange people who are don't to do very strange things okay um so one of the solutions is basically building sort of decentralized peer-to-peer systems and decentralized peer-to-peer societies okay uh one of the solutions is blockchain

technology okay so here is what the journalist from the telegraph has recently written so until recently we have needed Central bodies Bank stock market blah blah blah police forces to settle vital vital questions who owns this money who controls this company who has the right to vote and so on now we have a small piece of pure Incorruptible mathematics in computer code which allows to solve the same problems okay but is cryptography incorrupted okay so here is some X from the last year NSA budget the mission statement to covertly influence inser

vulnerabilities into commercial public Technologies okay um so it's quite funny but actually um probably have heard a lot about John Nash okay in maybe ethereum with vitalic okay but John Nash also was a cryptographer or have tried to be a cryptographer was not very successful but he has written in 1955 his letter a letter to the NSN which was Declassified very recently and in his letter he explains what according to him would be a secure crypto ALG and this is pretty revolutionary even today because he believed that a secure algorthm is such

that the security increases exponentially with the length of the key and actually very few crypto systems have ever achieved that I mean RSA is not secure in the sense of John Nash intention here okay so RSA is not a secure um crypto system for John okay so a an example of secure crypto system is an elliptic curve cryptography basically achieves this thing which is called exponential security okay um so tic cures are serious cryptography I mean how do you convince a b a bank that something is secure probably you

can't but here is a one method okay so you publish cryptographic challenges and currently if you break the elliptic C cryptography you can earn like $700,000 in prices and challenges okay so this is how you convince a banket that something is secure it's the only way we know okay so I always like this idea of crypto challenges and I was very naive but I have run written and said years ago and years before snow then that we should punish those who by their ignorance incompetence or because of a hidden agenda put everybody's security at a

great great risk okay I was very naive because these people are never ever punished and nothing but happens to them so um so these challenges are important I mean this is really how we know that something is secure okay by the way the Bitcoin otic curve is not included okay if you break it no price you break it okay so obviously as V what sense to me obviously there are billions of dollar out there if you make okay but where is the honest option okay here's the honest option like I mean if you work for the NSA you might quit and cash on this and retire option is that you put put a whole you get a

whole bunch of Bitcoin put it on bit toex negative 10x Leverage then announ your paper then watch the price drop well possibly it's very interesting ideas also in some countries actually you have legal right to have 10% of something you find if it's if it's if it's lost but here is not lost so you know I I don't really see an as option but it's an interesting okay so um so what about the Bitcoin the curve it's quite funny because you know the origin the origins of this curve are pretty obscure and recently Don Brown who is basically the head of this efficient cryptography Group which has standardized this elliptic C in the first place okay has actually denied any support whatsoever

for the SC so he has written I did not know that Bitcoin is using the SC I'm surprised to see anybody use it okay so this is from last year you should not use it this uh and I have surveyed different Industrial Systems and nobody ever uses this okay so if you compare the standard this SC which is this one which everybody uses okay and for example like 7% of um T TLS connections are used use tic curves now nowadays but 98% of these they use this single C it's like like something which almost everybody uses Microsoft German French government

systems you know EMV bank card C pgp IP SEC and NATO military cryptography and say and this recommend this curve and so on and so on okay um so um very few people actually recommend the Bitcoin elliptic and even even even less people use it ever I think Bitcoin is the only real serious system which ever uses it okay I think there is no other on planet Earth okay it's quite interesting so um I have made a bet you can bet with Bitcoins anonymously or not anonymously is your choice okay and you can bet money so you can bet it's going

to be broken within a year from today it's a game I don't think it's going to be broken but it's just a game to raise the awareness of in okay uh so you can you can bet Bitcoins whether yes or no it's going to be broken next there is a specific okay uh so how much should you bet don't bet everything ridiculous amount please there are some millionaires probably um in this room of who know some millionaires okay so um as long as we don't have 2,000 Bitcoins in this bets okay we simply not yet know if Bitcoin is is

broken okay you don't expect serious code Breakers to work for free if they can make $700,000 elsewhere they will not even look at the Bitcoin El to care they will tell you get lost you have other things to do okay so as long as there isn't 2,000 Bitcoins in this bet you absolutely cannot know if this Bitcoin C is not already broke by like by somebody who is an expert okay um so um because you know if somebody can break it they rather steal Bitcoins for example then you know where is the honest option there's no Hest option okay um so they would rather Ste some Bitcoins by the way this is

possible Le public Keys revealed um so tip use each Bitcoin address only once everybody I think knows that so um Bitcoin has a lot of issues you know um I will skip that you know crypto could get broken monetary policies either weird or mad you know um 51% attacks and double spending is actually easy as Claim by many people including myself and Le and so on uh peer to-peer network is actually collapsing slow speed uh poor anonity uh payment fees are not improving and so on okay so Bitcoin is not in a good shape simp okay um and also Bitcoin has so far failed to achieve the most basing goal

being a decentralized 52p CS this is absolutely totally fail on this subject okay if you want to know more details look at my blog and so so basically we need to do better than this we need to do uh to try to improve it okay so uh from the business perspective the question is really what happens next okay and we have a very interesting preceden in business Yahoo and Google story there was this guy who was sitting on the board of Yahoo and on this board meeting somebody has said let's improve the search engine okay um you know because we want to improve our business

and other people on this board meeting of yaku said get lost now search just 3% of our business we are major Media Company Etc we don't need to improve the the search engine this is how yaku disappeared and the whole business was stolen by Google okay so there was a Bo meeting like this so uh the Yahoo of crypto coins which is Bitcoin is now waiting for Google of crypto coins to steal Bitcoin business okay so maybe V Le will steal it or nobody knows okay um and this purely on technical superiority and without a single hostile shot I mean Google never advertised okay they never done anything bad to anybody or at least they claim so

okay they're just better people switched okay um so this is an interesting question is it going to happen Okay um well I think this is this is not guaranteed to happen so this is a really a big question this does does not always happen Okay so maybe it's going to happen ask V what he say okay uh well I was very naive during my whole life you know I always kind of consider that better security does automatically happen in the future and with more cryptography and I thought the cryptography actually solves any problems you know and things like that and typically it

doesn't okay so um will better security Prevail it's not obvious and it's even less obvious in financial systems okay because a right amount of insecurity well allows to sell insurance like recently I I spoken to a guy who told me that actually you know um major companies in the UK are buying a lot of data from criminals about credit cards only because they will be able to Blacklist them very quickly and this is what their business is about and it was hypothesized that actually they they are the major source of revenue for criminals okay it's quite interesting um and so so you have this problem of you know

profiting from crime which is many companies actually do um it also is good for us I mean it trads our survival and cyber security skills okay it creates lots of interesting jobs for our students okay and possibly avoids criminals to engage in more violent crime maybe it's not so bad to have all this insecurity and fra okay so I'm not saying that better security always prevails it's not obvious so another question is does better money Prevail in general okay so again crypto Engineers like me sometimes naely hope that better currencies will drive not so good currencies out of

business okay but there's a famous gression law which actually was first stated by Copernicus in 1517 uh which says exactly otherwise bad money is driving good money out business okay and this is more or less what Bitcoin is the bad option okay so Bitcoin has gained excessive popularity not because it was technically very good it never was or had solid intrinsic value or it was fast and convenient it never was okay it has thrived because it has created huge expectations which temporarily Bitcoin competitors could not meet maybe for now Bitcoin Remain the obvious choice and some sort of natural

monopoly so far so this is related to the question of network effects so antonopulos who's a former UC student points out that when you have this sort of technology which is kind of just good enough and it achieves this network scale then good enough suddenly becomes per it's just good enough okay uh so he says I don't see any Al coin displacing bad news for V okay uh if Bitcoin crashes again according toos it will be better because we blow it by accident and this is very likely okay I

mean you know my Bitcoin client just crashes like three times per day at this moment okay and some Bitcoins have disappeared few days ago and nobody can explain why okay uh so you know I have published this paper about program self destruction of cryptocurrencies and Krypton have renamed my paper Bitcoin suicide PDF it's not my idea okay actually my paper I show that quite possibly Bitcoin is exempt from this destruction process natural monopoly okay and whatever is bad with Bitcoin is even worse with most altcoins okay so it's not at all an obvious

conclusion okay um so we we have published a few uh papers on on bitcoin we have a Blog just better crypto.com blog by better crypto.com um um I have also worked on the question of speed so here is a citation um which I have given an interview for the financial times it's not true that Bitcoin is the internet of money Bitcoin is the horse cage of money because it's so badly slow you know okay so this is one of the issues but today is really about security okay keep this one but the funny thing about Bitcoin is there is a interesting relationship in Bitcoin security and speed I have spent my whole life in

cyber security and security and speed are always opposit in cyber security and here it's not like this it's very very strange and interesting so I claim the security impli speeding bit why because you know um um the only reason people are not accepting Bitcoin transactions instantly is out of fear of various attacks which do not happen so frequently okay if you improve the security you could instantly have high frequency trading on bitcoin on current bitcoin wave like maybe micr transactions maybe even faster okay you could have that on current bit okay so it's it's a peculiar

sort of situation which I'm not used to okay so uh well probably everybody knows about everything about Bitcoin so I will skip the introduction um I'll just make a few remarks so you have you know in Bitcoin have these things which are called wallets and it's either a file or a program which is also called a wallet uh so I skip the explanations um Bitcoin is a public key cryptography based currency um um you have the blockchain I think everybody knows how blockchain works okay you have bitco [Music] addresses uh it's validated like 10 minutes or more so it's pretty

slow okay and basically this process of transferring Bitcoins is a process which is based on digital signatures you have transactions with several inputs several outputs and each of the inputs for the transaction has to be digitally s okay so it's everything is underpinned by this digital signatur here if it's broken all your Bitcoins will be stol okay so I skip some slides here I want to talk about other things okay so if you look at these um signature scripts okay uh well they are composed of a ecdsa signature okay so it's there

is RNs and then you have the public key which is typically revealed at this moment okay and the interesting part here is this this uh R which is which is R okay but actually it's not the random that you actually generate as a random okay you normally generate a random then you apply elliptic operation and this is the second random which you update and this one is this is the one which is going to be published and this has very important consequences because uh it's not obvious that if your random generator is bad that you will actually see it so easy on the blockchain because of this operation which is being applied after the random number generation and this is one of the

crucial problems in our recent research okay um so they are obviously thefts they they are thefts due to bad randoms so uh this question was first publicized by one of the Bitcoin developers Neil Schneider um in January 2013 example this random is repeated more than 5050 times in the Bitcoin blockchain okay and interestingly it was used twice by the same user okay and actually it's possible to see that each use the same random by the same User it's very easy to break actually n already publishes a formula how to compute the private key and you can steal the Bitcoins in St okay so this has been already done and it's it's

not very complicated uh it's not it's much more complicated if the same random is used by two different uses okay um so this sort of events have been happening for years and for some time they have stopped like in the August 2013 there was like the last event of this sort the Android bug was fixed and everybody in Bitcoin thought that we are secure against this sort of things okay and actually um if you look at simple signatures like without multi signature and there were there were there was no

other events in the Bitcoin blockchain since that time okay but now something interesting happened so so by the way there effects for example it was reported that some somebody has stolen 55 Bitcoins using this method and the funny thing it's still there so so the guy is not kind of afraid of how to spend it you know he's afraid of touching this money it's still sitting on the blockchain even today okay so it's because this became so famous the guy is really afraid of you know going there and spend this one okay so it's still there um but now recently there was a second major outbreak in May

2014 lots of lots of events huge numbers okay and they are still happening like last month you know there these things are still happening okay so so the it's it's it's has not stopped and there is a lot more events in 2014 than 2013 okay um so here is an example of a recent bad random from September last month okay it appears eight times in blog this number 3229 925 okay however it's used by different users okay so it's not obvious how would you you dis steal bitco it's possible to

see that each of these users can steal the other users Bitcoins that's correct but it's not that like everybody can steal Bitcoins okay potential is the same person if it's the same person there's no risk I mean you can just steal your own Bitcoins okay the same app you know then there's no risk yes yeah so isn't it smart to try to discover which app it is and then once you know which it is so you just use all the apps generate a transactions out if you have the source code of this app and if you can reproduce the randomness then it's much worse then you can steal all the Bitcoins okay absolutely agree okay but it's not something that it's necessarily

easy to to do okay yes okay so at this moment it's not always so dangerous okay so what is the question okay so here comes our recent research so in in all the about random attacks published so far um um we had the situation that only very few few users were concerned basically like one person can steal the other people the other person's Bitcoins and that's it okay so only like 100 accounts in history of Bitcoin few hundred accounts are concerned by this problems and and many of these accounts are zero have zero Bitcoins at this

moment okay money have already moved elsewhere okay so um you might think it's a low risk attack okay so now I will explain why this is actually a very very important attack this is the new discovery and it's really really scary and it's going to be published in a few days so actually um in our research we show that under certain conditions all Bitcoins in Cold Storage can be stolen and so actually millions of accounts are potentially affected by this vulnerability okay it's like a combination of two different vulnerabilities so here is the new paper should be available within like one week

I have just submitted to ePrint server yesterday okay um so um is there a fix by the way so there is one it's widely known okay so RFC 6979 by Tom por okay um so if you have applied this many people some people have done ages ago it's no problem okay however if you have not applied this we claim that no existing C Storage solution which have not appli this patch can claim to resist to our attacks we claim that inherently hard to

know that all Bitcoins can be stolen by this attack probably before it's too late because the attack has this offline stage which is inherently difficult but not in invasible and somebody with a large computing power just do it ahead of you and they will detect suitable events and steal all your Bitcoins from the whole security domain so it could be like with one single attack you will steal Bitcoins from millions of accounts potentially okay um so which systems are affected well um you know I I don't have a very good picture about this you need to talk to different developers so for example this RFC is already applied by

Electro multibit and treasure and few other uh but there are some people who are you know very very strangely unpatched like blockchain info in secure at this moment and they rely on you know open SSL I mean can you trust open SSL is ridiculous okay uh Bitcoin core apparently a PCH was submitted like J uary 2014 and it's kind of still there waiting waiting to be applied it's very strange I don't really understand exactly what happens so is going on over there okay um so if you if you want to know details about this um this uh

software questions I'm not really an expert you know but um there is a our Italian Friend actually and co-author has made a presentation about this in Malaysia two days ago and so he knows a bit more than me on this topic okay because he like spend more time inspecting the source code so um um and so so this is everything that I know about this um applicability of these attacks yes questions can you explain briefly how the attack Works uh I think it's not a topic for today it's it's a combination attack which uses Hardware deterministic wallets and VIP

p032 okay and but random events in combination to break all accounts in a given security domain or even all accounts in several um security domains simultaneously and is it also um an attack on that Randomness or something yes yes absolutely it requires bad Randomness how can you attack all Randomness at once uh isn't that just because you know um again it's not really a topic for today but um because this this key management systems which are very very widely used in with Community are excessively

fragile I mean they are such that a small Security in incident in a remote corner of your system compromises the home it's it's really really bad okay so the the theault also lies in this ay management standard specified by pet well and P well and Greg Maxwell who had kind of you know inventors of these things and these things are really really fragile they are kind of secure except that very fragile it's like a it's like a Minefield you just move one cm to the right or to the left you explode it's super super dangerous and this RFC thing is a is

it's a fix that's fixes um the bad random Generation Well it's basically a deterministic way to good um to get random numb so therefore you know it's a it's a it's a very good fix against kind of all but random attacks yes so if I understand correctly if blockchain.info patches it everybody needs to send their Bitcoins to a new patch well they should do it for you basically yes they should force you to do it otherwise most people will never do it okay this is what people with Android apps have done PR they just forced every user to change that automatically transferred bit cods you know if I if I take a coin and I flip it 100 times

would that be a good random or can that be broken too uh yes it should be a good random if you if you take a physical coin yes okay but deterministic Randomness is even better than real Randomness okay because you know real could be hacked okay so for example it's wiely known that the NSA have infected a lot of you know firmware for hard drives so for example if you have your Bitcoin app which is using op SSL what the what the hard drive does on behalf of the NSA to replace on the flight the open SSL DL which you load by another specially

crafted one which has a better NSA compatible random generator okay it's one of the ways to to to to to bridge it okay so um uh like if it's if it's a Bitcoin smart carard you will basically as an attacker hug the random number generator physically and disable it okay and then and then you can break and you can extract all the keys from the SM and so on okay so really the deterministic method specified by Tom in this standard is really better than any even like a real random method

okay um so uh that's it for today so really it's a survey of different questions relating ecdsa in Bitcoin do we have additional questions I am here to answer I think the conference is over so we have time maybe I don't know yes yes please it's perhaps the question on everyone's mind is where do we need to put our Bitcoins in order to be secure electrum treasure multibit well I cannot answer this question I'm nobody have paid me to advertise a specific solution yes you did this B thing where you can do the Bitcoins and if you break it you get a bit um you can bet yes or

no sorry sorry what the the bet you did the BET yes yes will Bitcoin be broken by 2015 by September 2015 but what is the incentive to vote Yes because if if it's broken the Bitcoins you you win are worthless so it's it's it's it's a again I you know maybe you think it's not broken but you will vote it will be broken for example there was a bet on Scottish referendum and you know my reasoning was you know if Scotland becomes independent it will have a lot of bad effects on my life okay so I have bought I have made a bet on yes they it become independent okay because then I would get some

compensation so I have been against my idea okay that you know I I thought it will not happen but I yes but yet I have bet that it will become independent because then I would get some compensation from the pet knowing that it it will have a lot of bad consequences for me if Scotland becomes inde case your compensation will be 0. yeah whatever but you know in it's not obvious that when you B on such a system that you really B according to what you think it's not true so you vot okay but it's it's again it's a game which is meant to raise the awareness about cryptography in Bitcoin Community which is pretty low to be honest okay yes what do you think about

quantum computers I mean in theory they could break yeah they could break all all this stuff yeah do you think that uh even I mean if this will be happened I mean this if they could break yes so so actually there are already post Quantum solutions to fix Bitcoin and actually vital sitting behind you actually has proposed one in 2013 okay so uh it's possible to build Bitcoin without any public cryptography whatsoever based only own hash functions and hash functions are already naturally postquantum things which are secure against kind of normal quantum computers like sh algorith so they are still Quantum shortcuts on hash functions but they are not like going from exponential to polinomial they like going from one

exponential to another exponential okay so you could have a secure Bitcoin even if everybody has a quantum computer on the okay okay any other questions yeah I have lot of comments so I won't go said that this is a very fun talk because you you speak about a lot of different topic they are all interesting but there's a lot of stuff I disagree with that you said uh for example you said that Bitcoin is quite slow uh because it need a 10 minute confirmation time in practice you don't need it I mean this is there are lot of ways that I to easily see if a transaction will be

double or not so it's not an issue in practice in NE well you know U it's it's not for us to decide it's it's a crowding out problem you know Bitcoin has so many problems and each of these problems makes space for Bitcoin competitors you see so the question of Google of Bitcoins is it coming or not yeah but this one specifically for me it's not I you said a lot of people use Bitcoins for kind of comp reason you know because people it make research for people people are stupid they want be act I think OK I people do not know the issue with Bitcoin security or simply

there's no big security uh when you said that the over cryptography algorithm was better the argument is that it's used by a lot of software but this is not an argument because you have a lot of bad security algorithm that's that's a good point but the thing is that like somebody have said actually antonos has said this you know if bitco the curves is is broken like everybody's in trouble and he has cheated you and it's not true because you know and so so the n c is such that if it gets broken everybody's in trouble and not only bit but currently the situation is that if Bitcoin C is broken

you know cryptographers will laugh at you and will tell you you know you have been an idiot because you know uh uh everybody knew in cryptography that this eliptic C is dodgy and I think you will not meet a a single professional cryptographer on planet F who would recommend this C to you maybe not a single one but I think that's on bitcoin you have the biggest incentive of all the cryptography algorithm I mean the part of good is right there and it's huge I mean but where is the honest option I don't want to Ste yes next question I don't know if it's true but while back I heard that

there were vulnerabilities in the the r version of the well the our version is still not okay According to some experts like berstein still does not put it on the list of safe CS but again it's much better than anything else because this is like if it's broken everybody's in trouble okay so this is so this is this is really like at least for Best Practices it's it's what you know so it's it's certainly much much better than Bitcoin it's not ideal of course and you could have a better de C some people have already done it like Stellar they have a different de C they they have changed um in July they have abandoned the Bitcoin the and many other people are following suit so you know

it's it's happening uh yes is that done on the basis of there might be something wrong with the K version or is it just to be in a space that it's basically dodging cryptography like if you talk to cryptographers the standard kind of approach is to never ever use something like this because you know unless you have so no cryptography would recommend it because it's a special elliptic curve and we have learned for ages in cryptography the special typically means broken like at least like 50% of the time um and this one you know it's it's actually already broken in the

theoretical sense is already an attack faster than like for normal curve but it's is just slightly faster and currently no expert believes that it could be really much much faster I do believe that it's going to be really much much faster but I mean minority okay so but but kind of you know state of the art in cryptography would be to never ever use something like this because it's fundamentally doging now people use this sort of Curves when they need something like pairings you know so in fancy cryptography side like you want to very short signatures um you know U you want to have really Advanced cryptography then people do use such curves but for normal cryptography should not

chances okay because it's like actually the public cryptography is a very interesting technology it's a disruptive technology British secret service were the first to actually invent it they have not published okay so Americans rivest Shamir and merel Etc they have published it and um and public cryptography is inherently fragile so I have spent many many years of my life inventing new public systems I have 20 papers published about this and most of public crypto systems ever invented were always broken I say is also broken in some sense it's not exponential secure and so on okay so basically public cryptography is very

fragile okay and U my personal view is that every public crypto system will be broken always after a number of years 10 50 years maybe okay uh I mean in the sense that it will be much faster than every body would think it would be okay so you know like you can build a block ciper har function whatever an idiot anybody can build a block Cy function which will be secure enough okay um a monkey could do it okay public cryptography is a different sort of Technology it's a place where experts fail with prob like 50 or 60% the best experts on our planet Amat fail with probability close to

one okay so it's really like a rare animal it's it's a rare animal these public cryto systems which are secure they extremely few of them and even those are broken number of years like even at this El curves with like you know $700,000 prices half of them are already kind of hypothetically broken in theory okay so you know it's public cryptography is just collapsing every year and it's it's like if you were the history of cryptography to learn from history you will understand how it work it's it's inherently you have this kind of you know um um mindfield thing which is that you know you do a small mistake

and you explode it like it took it really took us really years to understand how to use RSA properly most variants most industrial variants of um public cryptography have been broken like most I mean at least 90% okay so at least 90% of um industrial public cryptography systems which were proposed were broken in the coming years in some sense more or less strong okay so it's it's public cryptography is inherently difficult to do and this is going to always be [Music] so so I hope you enjoyed this talk by

Nicola ctoa I thought it was very interesting and also refreshing to hear somebody come forth and point out some of the potential flaws in the technology now if you want to support the show there are multiple ways you can do that you can start by leaving us a review on iTunes and you can also leave us a tip at epicenter bitcoin.com tips and we want to thank all of those who have been supporting the show through their donations if you want to stay up to date you can follow us on Twitter at epicenter BTC you can also find us on Facebook and go+ and for those those of you who are not up to date you should know that we're now doing live Google Hangouts in which you can interact with guests and ask your questions on Twitter and in a Q&A module and we usually

announce those Hangouts just a few days before they happen on all our different social media Platforms in fact as I record this we're getting ready to do a live interview with David Johnston who is an investor technologist he's managing director of the daps fund a board member of the MSE protocol Foundation as well as the co-founder of the bit Angels Network and so that interview will come out on Monday November 3rd so be sure to look out for that on iTunes SoundCloud YouTube and everywhere you are used to finding us so thanks again for listening and we look forward to being back on [Music] Monday