I'll send my PhD dissertation in a week or so, where I present 3 years of work on models and protocols for the security of wireless ad-hoc networks. I do not have any industrial experience yet, but three years of doctoral studies plus a total of a year of various internships make up for it. I have worked on routing protocols for ad-hoc networks, a model to analyze network-based intrusion detection systems based on their inputs, definitions of the very meaning of routing security, and before this, some work on the infrastructure for computing grids.
Asides from ad-hoc networks, I have kept up-to-date with other forms of security, through CTFs (Matasano's are awesome, by the way). I am still a developer at heart who loves to learn new things and make systems elegant. I also taught the basics of algorithmics and C at my university for the last three years. Although I am mostly using Perl these days, I do have some experience with Python, Ruby, C++, and Ada.
I am still unsure of what the next steps are for me. I have cultivated a strong variety of skills, and I would like to cultivate that variety and keep learning new things. If this rings true to you, and there is a need for people like me in your company, drop me a line !
They do not mention sources, but I'd say it is some sort of open secret which is known by a lot of journalists. They mention that this officially does not exist, and from off-the-record talks, it does not exist because it's "secret défense".
Top500 computers could have done this sort of attack when CPU and/or GPU mining was all the hype, but now with FPGAs and ASICs, the hardware required to have an impact is too specialized for any sort of general-purpose computing.
That is correct. All of the Top500 computers combined, all 500 of them, would not be sufficient to perform a majority attack on the Bitcoin block chain.
The global network hash rate is currently 35 Thash/s.
A typical GPU found in a supercomputer (Nvidia Tesla K10/K20/C20xx) does roughly 100-200 Mhash/s.
A typical modern CPU core does roughly 1-2 Mhash/s.
You would either need 175k-350k GPUs, or 17.5M-35M CPU cores to attack Bitcoin. If you look at the Top500 list, they have maybe a few tens of thousands of GPUs combined, and about 10M CPU cores (watch out, the core counts in the list combines CPUs and GPUs, I found this out when making sense of the numbers years ago: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=14 )
Plus the network hash rate is predicted to increase by at least +20 Thash/s (to 55 Thash/s total) in the next month due to Avalon finishing delivery of their first batch of ASICs. Bottom line, no, all Top500 computers combined could not attack Bitcoin.
Yes the NSA can, and has, developed custom ASIC chips. They currently do it via http://www.trustedfoundryprogram.org However I doubt the NSA will ever care about Bitcoin (their primary mission is intelligence, not breaking decentralized currencies). And by the time they do (if they do) it might be too late for them to be able to attack it (the network hash rate might have grown too much, making such an attack too costly).
If anything Bitcoin provides a full transaction record with transaction participant IDs (even if those IDs are not names). It probably helps intelligence gathering.
I'm wondering about the security of the generators and hashes you use. SHA-256 is to my knowledge fine, however the Mersenne twister used by Python isn't (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister, although there may be modifications in Python). You have little plaintext, so I can't really find anything obvious, but given the nature of the site, you may want to use something cryptographically secure.
4chan is not only /b/ and porn, there are surprisingly good SFW boards too. Well, maybe "SFW" is pushing it a bit, since the tone is still 4-chaney, but then look around the technology, cooking, or traditionnal games boards: you'll be surprised.
Stack: Security, verification of cryptographic protocols, developer (Perl and Java mostly)
Resume: http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~rjamet/CV.pdf, more details on previous work in http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~rjamet/
Contact: rjamet [AT] imag [DOT] fr
I'll send my PhD dissertation in a week or so, where I present 3 years of work on models and protocols for the security of wireless ad-hoc networks. I do not have any industrial experience yet, but three years of doctoral studies plus a total of a year of various internships make up for it. I have worked on routing protocols for ad-hoc networks, a model to analyze network-based intrusion detection systems based on their inputs, definitions of the very meaning of routing security, and before this, some work on the infrastructure for computing grids.
Asides from ad-hoc networks, I have kept up-to-date with other forms of security, through CTFs (Matasano's are awesome, by the way). I am still a developer at heart who loves to learn new things and make systems elegant. I also taught the basics of algorithmics and C at my university for the last three years. Although I am mostly using Perl these days, I do have some experience with Python, Ruby, C++, and Ada.
I am still unsure of what the next steps are for me. I have cultivated a strong variety of skills, and I would like to cultivate that variety and keep learning new things. If this rings true to you, and there is a need for people like me in your company, drop me a line !