Joachim Breitner: Lattice Attacks on Ethereum, Bitcoin, and HTTPS

We're very pleased to have Joachim Breitner [1] speak to us on lattice attacks on Ethereum [2] and other ECDSA-based [3] systems such as SSH, HTTPS, and Bitcoin. Joachim has a PhD from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and worked on formal verification of Haskell during a post-doc. Joachim's abstract follows:

"The ECDSA signature scheme, which is used in Bitcoin, Ethereum and others, requires a fresh secret number, the 'nonce', for each signature. When this number is not generated uniformly at random, the security of the signature is in danger, and the private key may be recovered from the signatures, using a lattice-based algorithm. Nadia Heninger [4] and Joachim Breitner ran these attacks against the signatures encoded on popular blockchains, and showed that vulnerable implementations are out there."

Chris Peel will begin the event with a introduction to lattices as preparation for Joachim's talk. Chris' abstract follows: "Lattice reduction and related lattice tools are used in post-quantum cryptography, digital communication, and mathematics. Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovacsz (LLL) lattice reduction is a foundational tool in the field and is widely used to analyze and break many cryptosystems. I will introduce lattices, the LLL technique, and speculate on a 'lattice blockchain'." Slides are at [5].

We're very thankful to the BNY Mellon Innovation Center [6] for hosting us. Food will be provided by the Decentralization Foundation [7].

[1] https://www.joachim-breitner.de/
[2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/023.pdf
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_Algorithm
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgbrpmJ49r4
[5] https://github.com/christianpeel/pub/blob/master/introToLattices.pdf
[6] https://www.bnymellon.com/us/en/who-we-are/global-innovation.jsp
[7] https://d24n.org/