Breaking Bitcoin 2019
2019-06-08..2019-06-09
Amsterdam, Netherlands
as the organisers put it
Breaking bitcoin is an event for the technical community focusing on security of Bitcoin and everything around it. The presentations will be technical, presenting practical or theoretical attacks or vulnerabilities on the network, the users, or other resources.
who it's for
security researchers, bitcoin core developers, wallet developers, protocol engineers, privacy researchers, lightning developers, mining pool operators, web application security engineers
topics
MFF mempool format and tooling; bitcoin p2p v2 opportunistic encryption; BIP Taproot and Schnorr signatures; MuSig multi party signing protocols; hardware wallet seed extraction attacks; threshold wallet cryptographic vulnerabilities; coinjoin and payjoin deanonymization; mempool churn, RBF and miner behavior; topological analysis of Lightning routing; decentralized mining pool attacks (P2Pool, smart pool); reproducible builds with Guix bootstrap; web wallet supply chain vulnerabilities
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| FUD (Perceived vs Real Risks in Bitcoin) | Aaron van Wirdum, Jimmy Song, Eric Voskuil, Rodolfo Novak | 58m |
Panel debates concrete tradeoffs: Bitcoin functions today more as a store of value than a daily payment rail, SegWit activation in 2017 proves upgrades are… | ||
| Breaking Bitcoin Privacy | Chris Belcher | 43m |
Blockchain deanonymization relies on wallet clustering via heuristics such as 30–40% address reuse and the common-input-ownership heuristic, which together… | ||
| Bitcoin P2P Encryption | Jonas Schnelli | 27m |
A new peer‑to‑peer v2 message protocol adds secp256k1 ECDH opportunistic encryption with HKDF-derived keys and ChaCha20‑Poly1305 AEAD, sending a 32‑byte pubkey… | ||
| Bitcoin Web Application Security | Bryan Bishop | 24m |
Catalogue of real exploits and concrete defenses: shows file inclusion, source‑code disclosure, mass‑assignment and CSRF failures that let wallets or admin… | ||
| Mempool Analysis and Simulation | Kalle Alm | 27m |
A new MFF mempool format plus bcq/cqdb libraries record every transaction event, including raw invalidated transactions and blocks, in append‑only cluster… | ||
| Bitcoin Build System Security: Turtles All the Way Down | Carl Dong | 31m |
Reproducible builds (Gitian) stop arbitrary uploads but not poisoned toolchains that implement Ken Thompson style attacks; the claim is that switching to Guix… | ||
| Secure protocols on BIP taproot | Jonas Nick | 26m |
BIP‑Taproot creates outputs that hide either a single Schnorr key or a Merkle‑committed script tree and uses a pay‑to‑contract tweak; implementation work… | ||
| Security and Attacks on Decentralized Mining Pools | Alexei Zamyatin | 26m |
Describes concrete weaknesses and experiments with decentralized pools: P2Pool relies on a FIFO share chain that reduces average block size to about 61%… | ||
| Bitcoin Selfish Mining and Dyck Words | Ricardo Pérez Marco | 40m |
Paper proves with martingale stopping-time proof that without difficulty adjustment no withholding beats honest mining, then derives exact revenue formulas… | ||
| 5 Insights Into Defense of Bitcoin | Warren Togami | 25m |
Argues that Bitcoin survives by a safety‑first, decentralized development process with peer review and online change control, citing segwit took 13 months from… | ||
| Don't Trust, Verify Panel | Chris Belcher, Bryan Bishop, Mark Friedenbach, Warren Togami | 44m |
Argues that running a full node and verifying blocks matters but verifying software supply chains matters too, proposing reproducible Gideon builds as a better… | ||
| Economic and Social Risks Panel | Wassim Z. Alsindi, Aaron van Wirdum, Max Hillebrand, Felix Weis | 56m |
Panel argues that Bitcoin’s survival hinges on concrete facts not slogans: the 21 million cap is treated as a social rule (recall the inflation bug that was… | ||
| Breaking Wasabi and Automated Wallets | Udi Wertheimer | 27m |
Wasabi’s automated decision-making can break privacy and bleed funds: a remix-requeue heuristic that detects “coinjoin-like” transactions makes a wallet reopen… | ||
| The Future of Hardware Wallets | Stepan Snigirev | 25m |
Current hardware wallets cannot reliably tell which inputs they control, enabling a CoinJoin attack that signs the same UTXO twice and steals funds; proposed… | ||
| Extracting Seeds from Hardware Wallets | Charles Guillemet | 38m |
Hardware wallets in multiple designs reveal practical, reproducible attacks: an "air‑gapped" Le Pal device exposes an unlocked MediaTek bootloader and… | ||
| Cryptographic Vulnerabilities in Threshold Wallets | Omer Shlomovits | 34m |
Analysis of threshold ECDSA implementations shows concrete attacks on Lindell-style two‑party protocols using Paillier homomorphic encryption and… | ||
| Blind Statechains | Ruben Somsen | 28m |
Proposal for moving full UTXOs off-chain using a blind signing server that blindly signs transfer updates so ownership passes by handing over a transitory key… | ||
| Breaking Watchman: Pushing the Limits on Federated Hot Wallet Security | Gregory Sanders | 23m |
A federated hot wallet for Liquid uses an 11-of-15 multisig with a long time‑lock emergency backup and processes peg-outs in 15-minute round‑robin rounds where… | ||
| Neutrino, Good and Bad | Jimmy Song | 28m |
Compares BIP37 to Neutrino and shows Neutrino computes a universal deterministic per-block filter so servers do one filter per block instead of per client… | ||
| Topological Analysis of Bitcoin's Lightning Network | István András Seres | 23m |
A graph snapshot from Jan 3, 2019 shows the Lightning Network with >2000 nodes, >16,000 channels and ~500 BTC total capacity; average degree is ~7, diameter 6… | ||
| Security Aspects of Lightning Network Routing | Joost Jager | 50m |
Lightning routing often leaves funds locked or payments stalled because intermediate hops time out or return useless failures; multi‑part payments and probing… | ||
| Lightning Security Panel | Michael Folkson, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, Justin Camarena, Matt Corallo | 46m |
Panelists describe concrete security work: automated fuzz testing against state machines, watchtowers with delegated proofs, and static channel backups for… | ||
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