Bitcoin brain wallets, were way of turning nothing but a password into a keypair, at least until it was widely understood what a bad idea this was. The wake of data left behind includes a very interesting corpus of passwords to analyze and logs of attacker activity - after all blockchains never forget. This talk focuses on what we can learn from this. Do people select stronger passwords when more money is on the line? How quickly does bitcoin sent to weak brain wallets get drained? How many distinct thieves can be identified?
Ryan Castellucci has been interested in cryptography and computer security since childhood. He has been doing work on Bitcoin key cracking for several years, first presenting on it at DEF CON 23. By day, Ryan does browser security research to detect bots, scrapers and other forms of automated http clients for White Ops. He's on twitter as @ryancdotorg and blogs sporadically at https://rya.nc/
Marie Vasek is an assistant professor in the computer science department at the University of New Mexico. She helps lead StopBadware, an anti-malware organization for which she started working in 2011. Her research focuses on cybercrime measurement, particularly web-based malware and abuse using cryptocurrencies. She received a PhD from the University of Tulsa, an MS from Southern Methodist University, and a BA from Wellesley College, all in computer science.