In this week’s episode, we sit down with Joseph Bonneau (http://jbonneau.com/), Assistant Professor at NYU and co-author on the Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) paper. We discuss VDFs, what they are, how they were developed and what they can be used for.
Here are a few links that we reference:
Blockchain 101: Randomness episode with Justin Drake (https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/74)
Verifiable Delay Functions by Dan Boneh, Joseph Bonneau, Benedikt Bünz, and Ben Fisch (https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/601.pdf)
vdfresearch.org (https://vdfresearch.org/)
Numbers Game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game)
A Programmer Solved a 20-Year-Old, Forgotten Crypto Puzzle (https://www.wired.com/story/a-programmer-solved-a-20-year-old-forgotten-crypto-puzzle/)
Bitcoin Book (http://bitcoinbook.cs.princeton.edu/)
Thank you to this week's sponsor Trail of Bits (https://trailofbits.com)
Trail of bit recently released a blog post that might be interesting for our listeners who are concerned about privacy. The post is about the concept of 'Safe browsing'. Safe browsing claims to protect users by providing them with something called k-anonymity.
Recent security news suggests that the k-anonymity has failed at protecting user privacy in certain circumstances. This is the topic that Trail of Bits explores in the blog post. Find out more about how k-anonymity works and why it is insufficient here: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/10/30/how-safe-browsing-fails-to-protect-user-privacy/
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