Backdooring Cryptocurrencies: The Underhanded Crypto Contest Winners

DEF CON 24

Presented by: Adam Caudill, Taylor Hornby (@DefuseSec)
Date: Sunday August 07, 2016
Time: 12:30 - 13:00
Location: Crypto and Privacy Village

The Underhanded Crypto Contest is an annual competition that brings out the best ways of subtly inserting weaknesses into cryptography protocols and software. By understanding how adversarially-crafted weaknesses go unnoticed, we get better at discovering these errors in our designs and code. In this talk we present the technical details of the best one or two contest entries.

Taylor Hornby

Taylor is known for his carefully-written security tools, including a side-channel-free password generator and a cryptography library for PHP. He regularly contributes to a number of open source projects by security auditing and reviewing source code. As a recent graduate of the University of Calgary, his research is focused on exploit defense mechanisms and side-channel attacks. In his spare time, he enjoys studying physics from a computer science perspective and is an organizer of the Underhanded Crypto Contest.

Adam Caudill

Adam Caudill is a security consultant with over 15 years of experience in security and software development; with a focus on application security, secure communications, and cryptography. Active blogger, open source contributor, and advocate for user privacy and protection. His work has been cited by many media outlets and publications around the world, from CNN to Wired and countless others.


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