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In a recent conversation with Forbes, Ty Miller, the Managing Director of Threat Intelligence, talked about blockchain technology, privacy and security. Blockchain technology has been growing during the last years and it has been embraced by several companies and agencies due to the fact that it provides increased security features.
It also provides a higher degree of decentralization. Ty Miller is a keynote speaker at the Black Hat conferences, recognized for being the most technical security event in the world. At the same time, Miller has been involved in the ethical hacking industry for over 15 years.
Miller explains that blockchain is still a new technology and it will be subject to similar flaws as other protocols previously invented. About it, he commented:
“Many protocol-based security flaws exist due to either a flaw in the protocol itself, a flaw in the implementation of the protocol, or a flaw in the logic of how the protocol is used by developers. A good example of a critical protocol being abused is DNS. […] Despite being one of the oldest and most critical protocols, there have been serious security flaws that have been released.”
One of the examples he gave is the Bailiwick flaw that allowed a DNS cache poisoning attack allowing attackers to hijack arbitrary domains and redirect web and email traffic from the victim. In order to solve this issue, companies and services provided from all over the world have been working together to prevent malicious threats.
Nevertheless, this was not the only critical flaw present. The SSL protocol, that ensures privacy for users, has been affected by several weaknesses. One of the examples that the hacker gave is related to SSL certificates being signed with MD5 hashes, which are known to be flawed.
In the future, Blockchain technology could also be affected by. For Ty Miller, this is only a matter of time before security professionals and malicious threat actors focus on the protocol.
According to the expert, there are some defensive actions that can be taken to prevent privacy breaches. One of the solutions is to use encryption. He mentioned that encrypted data on the blockchain is unable to be changed. If there is a flaw in the encryption algorithm, the encrypted data may be then decrypted to reveal private details as computing power continues to become stronger.
Applications running on top of blockchain technology require the end user to protect their privacy by themselves. However, this cannot be ideal and it can harm users themselves.
As Miller explains, there have been several crypto-related banks released by inexperienced team members that were hacked or stolen.
In the future, Miller is sure that the possibility of a 51% attack increases and could allow attackers to completely control the blockchain. The worst case scenario will be when hackers will gain access to millions of hacked machines and will have the necessary computing power to control the whole network.
Quantum computer will make this even easier for attackers and hackers. Thus, blockchain networks would have to provide solutions for this issue. The technology is relatively new and it can certainly be affected in the future.
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