Time: 9-11am, September 19, 2019

Location: 1501 Science Building

Title: Cryptocurrency Analytics: Bitcoin vs. Cybersecurity

Abstract:

Money laundering, ransomware, and various kinds of scams have plagued cryptocurrencies and are responsible for billions of dollars in financial losses. In this talk, we discuss our recent efforts towards detecting and characterizing such illicit activities, focusing on Bitcoin. We present BlockStack, a full-stack blockchain analytics platform, and show how we used it to deanonymize Tor hidden service users and uncover the operation of MMM Ponzi scheme.

Bio:

Dr. Yazan Boshmaf is a research scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute. Before that, he worked in different R&D positions at Microsoft, Facebook, and Intel. Dr. Boshmaf received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of British Columbia under the mentorship of Prof. Konstantin Beznosov and Prof. Matei Ripeanu. His research interest revolves around the security and privacy of social and information networks, with an emphasis on problems that broadly impact the way people use technology and the Internet.