The Ring of Gyges: Using Smart Contracts for Crime
Event details
| Date | 08.06.2015 |
| Hour | 14:00 › 15:00 |
| Speaker | Ari Juels, Cornell Tech, New York (USA) |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Thanks to their anonymity (pseudonymity) and lack of trusted intermediaries, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have created or stimulated growth in many businesses and communities. A number of resulting activities, however, are harmful or criminal, including money laundering, marketplaces for illicit goods, and ransomware.
Emerging next-generation cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum will include rich scripting languages in support of *smart contracts*, programs that autonomously intermediate transactions and can consume authenticated data feeds as inputs. We show how these new cryptocurrency environments will enlarge the range of criminal activities that can be achieved with anonymity and minimal trust assumptions and may thus fuel new criminal ecosystems. Specifically, we show how cryptographically secure and incentive-compatible criminal smart contracts can facilitate leakage of confidential information, theft of cryptographic keys, and various real-world crimes (murder, arson, terrorism).
While some contracts for some of these crimes are efficiently realizable in existing scripting languages, others require cryptographic primitives such as succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs). Today's cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum can in principle support these primitives, but with minimal changes would enable far more efficient implementation. These changes would also benefit benign contracts, and are thus already envisioned by the community.
Joint work with Ahmed Kosba (UMD) and Elaine Shi (Cornell Univ.)
Emerging next-generation cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum will include rich scripting languages in support of *smart contracts*, programs that autonomously intermediate transactions and can consume authenticated data feeds as inputs. We show how these new cryptocurrency environments will enlarge the range of criminal activities that can be achieved with anonymity and minimal trust assumptions and may thus fuel new criminal ecosystems. Specifically, we show how cryptographically secure and incentive-compatible criminal smart contracts can facilitate leakage of confidential information, theft of cryptographic keys, and various real-world crimes (murder, arson, terrorism).
While some contracts for some of these crimes are efficiently realizable in existing scripting languages, others require cryptographic primitives such as succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs). Today's cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum can in principle support these primitives, but with minimal changes would enable far more efficient implementation. These changes would also benefit benign contracts, and are thus already envisioned by the community.
Joint work with Ahmed Kosba (UMD) and Elaine Shi (Cornell Univ.)
Links
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- Jean-Pierre Hubaux
Contact
- Sylvie Thomet