Wow, this was a really great read.
moar
Topic: 2013-04-12 Business Insider - I tried hacking Bitcoin and I failed - page 2. (Read 2318 times)
April 12, 2013, 02:45:19 PM
April 12, 2013, 02:32:44 PM
http://www.businessinsider.com/dan-kaminsky-highlights-flaws-bitcoin-2013-4
http://www.businessinsider.com/dan-kaminsky-highlights-flaws-bitcoin-2013-4
Quote
Two years ago, I tried to hack BitCoin. I failed.
This was very exciting. It is a fairly open secret that almost all systems can be hacked, somehow. It is a less spoken of secret that such hacking has actually gone quite mainstream. Everybody hacks … sometimes.
Seriously though, as an engineer and as a hacker (and I promise you, these are two very different things), BitCoin surprised me. Here was a system with the following properties:
Created an enormous global cloud of always-on, listening machines
Spoke its own fiddly little custom network protocol
Written in C++, which for all of its strengths is not usually the safest thing in the world to be reading random Internet garbage with
Directly implemented the delivery of a Pot Of Gold At The End Of The Rainbow for any hacker who could break it
By all extant metrics in security system review, this system should have failed instantaneously, at every possible layer. And, to be fair, it has failed at other layers – BitCoin thefts have occurred, in the meta-code that surrounds the core technology itself. But the core technology actually works, and has continued to work, to a degree not everyone predicted. Time to enjoy being wrong. What the heck is going on here ...
This was very exciting. It is a fairly open secret that almost all systems can be hacked, somehow. It is a less spoken of secret that such hacking has actually gone quite mainstream. Everybody hacks … sometimes.
Seriously though, as an engineer and as a hacker (and I promise you, these are two very different things), BitCoin surprised me. Here was a system with the following properties:
Created an enormous global cloud of always-on, listening machines
Spoke its own fiddly little custom network protocol
Written in C++, which for all of its strengths is not usually the safest thing in the world to be reading random Internet garbage with
Directly implemented the delivery of a Pot Of Gold At The End Of The Rainbow for any hacker who could break it
By all extant metrics in security system review, this system should have failed instantaneously, at every possible layer. And, to be fair, it has failed at other layers – BitCoin thefts have occurred, in the meta-code that surrounds the core technology itself. But the core technology actually works, and has continued to work, to a degree not everyone predicted. Time to enjoy being wrong. What the heck is going on here ...
http://www.businessinsider.com/dan-kaminsky-highlights-flaws-bitcoin-2013-4
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