Lifeboat Foundation

The World Economic Forum has partnered with the Inter-American Development Bank and the Colombian Inspector General’s Office to explore how distributed ledger technology can improve public transparency and integrity in school meal procurement.

The project, which is taking place this year, is multi-faceted and includes a software implementation with blockchain technology for the selection of school food vendors. It is co-designed with several partners from academia, the IT industry, and the non-profit world, including economists and computer scientists from the blockchain economics and governance consulting firm Prysm Group, the National University of Colombia, U.C. Berkeley, and the blockchain security firm Quantstamp.

The cryptocurrency Bitcoin is limited by its astronomical electricity consumption and outsized carbon footprint. A nearly zero-energy alternative sounds too good to be true, but as School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) Professor Rachid Guerraoui explains, it all comes down to our understanding of what makes transactions secure.

To explain why the system developed in his Distributed Computing Lab (DCL) represents a paradigm shift in how we think about cryptocurrencies—and about digital trust in general—Professor Rachid Guerraoui uses a legal metaphor: all players in this new system are “innocent until proven guilty.”

Continue reading “Researchers invent low-cost alternative to Bitcoin” »

Other companies are even closer than Google, and it’s about more than just cracking cryptocurrency. Mike has the details in this breaking report…

Rural communities are often built on agriculture and livestock. That means they’re also dependent upon a strong irrigation system – a potential weakness as the global water crisis grows. To more efficiently manage and coordinate the use of a scarce water supply in agricultural communities, a team from the Polytechnic University of Madrid proposed a blockchain-based automatic water control system.

“We investigated how blockchain technologies can be used to solve the problem of user competition for scarce resources in communities,” said Borja Bordel, the project’s lead investigator. “We particularize the problem to the irrigation communities, where independent users must trust a system that automates a fair and trustworthy distribution of the available water resources, according to an individual quota set by the community and the consumption forecasts of its users.”

Rules are paramount for the proposed system and must be established upfront by the community of users. In a prosumer environment, users establish regulations for their individual and community water quotas. Those regulations are then taken by a transformation engine and are built, compiled, and deployed. A simple infrastructure of common valves and pumps are complemented by interactive electronic devices and allow a SmartContract to oversee decision-making and control algorithms, as well as the state of the water sources.

SHA-256 is a one way hashing algorithm. Cracking it would have tectonic implications for consumers, business and all aspects of government including the military.

It’s not the purpose of this post to explain encryption, AES or SHA-256, but here is a brief description of SHA-256. Normally, I place reference links in-line or at the end of a post. But let’s get this out of the way up front:

• Sept 11: Original disclosure
• Sept 11: Community skepticism
• Sept 12: Claim retracted: [announcement] [press]

One day after Treadwell Stanton DuPont claimed that a secret project cracked SHA-256 more than one year ago, they back-tracked. Rescinding the original claim, they announced that an equipment flaw caused them to incorrectly conclude that they had algorithmically cracked SHA-256.

“All sectors can still sleep quietly tonight,” said CEO Mike Wallace. “Preliminary results in this cryptanalytic research led us to believe we were successful, but this flaw finally proved otherwise.”

Continue reading “Was SHA-256 cracked? Don’t buy into retraction!” »

The Electric Coin Company (ECC) says it discovered a new way to scale blockchains with “recursive proof composition,” a proof to verify the entirety of a blockchain in one function. For the ECC and zcash, the new project, Halo, may hold the key to privacy at scale.

A privacy coin based on zero-knowledge proofs, referred to as zk-SNARKs, zcash’s current underlying protocol relies on “trusted setups.” These mathematical parameters were used twice in zcash’s short history: upon its launch in 2016 and first large protocol change, Sapling, in 2018.

Zcash masks transations through zk-SNARKs but the creation of initial parameters remains an issue. By not destroying a transaction’s mathematical foundation – the trusted setup – the holder can produce forged zcash.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency adoption has failed to live up to expectations over recent years and fears around scams, fraud, and theft have not helped.

The bitcoin price, after its epic 2017 bull run, slumped last year– though has rebounded in 2019, climbing back above $10,000 per bitcoin.

Now, researchers have warned a staggering four out of the first five results returned when asking Google for a “bitcoin qr generator” led to scam websites–potentially furthering negative public perception around bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

After what has been a summer of “crippling ransomware attacks,” there has now been some respite courtesy of the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, which has proven that the playing field can be levelled. The city was hit back in July, with its data held hostage, ransomed for more than $5 million in bitcoin. But as the attackers waited for their payment, the city’s law enforcement agencies and technology teams had other ideas.

No types of organisations are immune from these types of attacks these days,” Mayor Jon Mitchell told reporters. The city government, he said, had been taking steps to strengthen our defences—but any network is only one keyword click away from an attack. Thankfully, he acknowledged, “the attack could have been much worse.” It hit on the July 4 holiday when many systems were shut down.

“The attack was a variant of the RYUK virus,” Mitchell confirmed. “The victim needs to make a ransom payment to acquire the decryption key from the attacker.” The attack did not affect all systems or disrupt all services, and on the return to work on July 5, the city kept systems turned off as they isolated the attack.

Bitcoin’s blockchain has been hijacked by a new strain of the Glupteba malware that uses the network to resist attacks, cyber security researchers have warned.

The malware uses the bitcoin blockchain to update, meaning it can continue running even if a device’s antivirus software blocks its connection to servers run by the hackers, security intelligence blog Trend Micro reported this week.

The Glupteba malware, first discovered in December 2018, is distributed through advertising designed to spread viruses through script and can steal an infected devices’ browsing history, website cookies, and account names and passwords with this particular variant found to be targeting file-sharing websites.