Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies have become a very big deal since its inception in January 2009 when the very first transaction was recorded to the blockchain. Since this time multiple other crypto-currencies have come into existence, an entire crypto-currency market has been created and the technology is making waves in the overall economy.
As with all technology it can be used for good or bad and Bitcoin is no different. The technology has grown in popularity and many people desire to use it in a secure, anonymous manner that would make it difficult to identify them. One option would be the use of a Bitcoin Tumbler. This tool was created because every Bitcoin transaction is written to a public ledger called the blockchain. Anyone can track Bitcoins as they are transferred between addresses.
When used properly the process of tumbling Bitcoin may increase your chances of remaining anonymous. This tool is useful to people looking to maintain their privacy, those who may be in restrictive countries or someone looking to make a purchase without it being tracked back to them. It also may be used to launder stolen Bitcoins, make illegal purchases or avoid leaving the paper trail found with traditional currencies.
Sean Thomas Jones is an accomplished information security professional and father of three. He has many years of experience securing and defending networks and hardening applications by using best practices, tools and technologies. Sean recently won the World Championship Title Belt in Spaghetti Monster Wrestling by defeating his children in the royal rumble. Along with this Championship, Sean also holds the SANS/GIAC Incident Handler, Intrusion Analysis and Web Application Penetration Tester Certifications along with the ITIL Foundation Certification. He practices his craft as a Cyber Crime Researcher at AlertLogic in Texas, which is affectionately called "GOD's Country" or the Lone Star State" and owes his success to his wonderful and patient wife. The design and implementation of a white-listed, end to end encrypted status application The design and implementation of a white-listed, end to end encrypted status application, or how we can have nice (private social network) things. The general line about privacy and social networking goes like this: "You can either have an easy to use and very social system with ads and data-mining or you can use GPG and like it". While there are many technical hurdles to overcome, the burden for a designer of a "private Twitter" or "private Facebook Wall" lies chiefly with user experience that rises above that of all of the difficult to use privacy tools we depend on today. In this talk, the code, frameworks, data structures, database queries and front-end UX will be examined, discussed and demoed in a working "Twitter-like" status update application.
David Dahl is the director of the Crypton project at SpiderOak. Crypton is a end to end encrypted application framework for mobile and desktop applications. In a previous life, David was a Senior Privacy Engineer at Mozilla Corporation where he helped edit the W3C Web Crypto API specification and created the Web Console in Firefox. Before this episode, he was a Software Engineer at Industrial Light & Magic working on the artists' knowledge base. He hacks on Zero-Knowledge software in his bunker somewhere in the Middle-West.