When Meiklejohn began faculty at Brown in 2004, she found cryptography. This department of laptop science appealed on to her puzzle dependancy—what was an encryption system, in any case, however one other secret language demanding to be deciphered?
There was a maxim in cryptography, sometimes called Schneier’s legislation after the cryptographer Bruce Schneier. It asserted that anybody can develop an encryption system intelligent sufficient that they will’t themselves consider a method to break it. But, like all the most effective conundrums and mysteries that had fascinated Meiklejohn since childhood, one other particular person with a distinct method of approaching a cipher may have a look at that “unbreakable” system and see a method to crack it and unspool an entire world of decrypted revelations.
Finding out the science of ciphers, Meiklejohn started to acknowledge the significance of privateness and the necessity for surveillance-resistant communications. She was not fairly a cypherpunk: The mental enchantment of constructing and breaking codes drove her greater than any ideological drive to defeat surveillance. However like many cryptographers, she nonetheless got here to consider within the want for actually unbreakable encryption, applied sciences that would carve out an area for delicate communications—whether or not dissidents organizing in opposition to a repressive authorities or whistleblowers sharing secrets and techniques with journalists—the place no snoop may attain. She credited her intuitive acceptance of that precept to her years as a teen who saved to herself, making an attempt to take care of her personal privateness in a Manhattan condo, with a federal prosecutor for a mom.
Meiklejohn confirmed actual expertise as a cryptographer and shortly grew to become an undergraduate instructing assistant to Anna Lysyanskaya, an excellent and extremely completed laptop scientist. Lysyanskaya had herself studied underneath the legendary Ron Rivest, whose identify was represented by the R within the RSA algorithm that shaped the premise for many trendy encryption, used in every single place from net browsers to encrypted electronic mail to immediate messaging protocols. RSA was one of many few basic encryption protocols that had not succumbed to Schneier’s legislation in additional than 30 years.
Lysyanskaya was on the time engaged on a pre-Bitcoin cryptocurrency known as eCash, first developed within the Nineties by David Chaum, a cryptographer whose groundbreaking work on anonymity programs had made potential applied sciences from VPNs to Tor. After ending her undergraduate diploma, Meiklejohn started a grasp’s diploma at Brown underneath Lysyanskaya’s wing, researching strategies to make Chaum’s eCash, a very nameless fee system, extra scalable and environment friendly.
The cryptocurrency scheme they had been laboring to optimize was, Meiklejohn admits in hindsight, tough to think about working in apply. In contrast to Bitcoin, it had a major problem: An nameless spender of eCash may basically forge a coin and move it off to an unsuspecting recipient. When that recipient deposited the coin at a sort of eCash financial institution, the financial institution may carry out a examine that might reveal the coin to be a forgery and the fraudster’s anonymity protections might be stripped away to disclose the identification of the unhealthy actor. However by then, the fraudster might need already run off with their ill-gotten items.
Nonetheless, eCash had a novel benefit that made it an enchanting system to work on: The anonymity it supplied was actually uncrackable. In truth, eCash was primarily based on a mathematical approach known as zero-knowledge proofs, which may set up the validity of a fee with out the financial institution or recipient studying the rest in any respect concerning the spender or their cash. That mathematical sleight of hand meant that eCash was provably safe. Schneier’s legislation didn’t apply: No quantity of cleverness or computing energy would ever have the ability to undo its anonymity.
When Meiklejohn first heard about Bitcoin in 2011, she had began her PhD research at UCSD however was spending the summer time as a researcher at Microsoft. A good friend on the College of Washington had talked about to her that there was a brand new digital fee system that folks had been utilizing to purchase medicine on websites just like the Silk Highway. Meiklejohn had moved on from her eCash research by then; she was busy with different analysis—programs that might permit individuals to pay highway tolls with out revealing their private actions, as an illustration, and a thermal digital camera approach that exposed PIN codes typed into an ATM by on the lookout for warmth remnants on the keypad. So, with heads-down focus, she filed Bitcoin’s existence away in her mind, barely contemplating it once more for the following 12 months.
Then, sooner or later on a UCSD laptop science division group hike in late 2012, a younger UCSD analysis scientist named Kirill Levchenko steered to Meiklejohn that maybe they need to begin wanting into this burgeoning Bitcoin phenomenon. Levchenko was fascinated, he defined as they trekked across the jagged panorama of the Anza Borrego Desert State Park, by Bitcoin’s distinctive proof-of-work system. That system demanded that anybody who needed to mine the forex expend monumental computing sources performing calculations— basically an enormous, automated puzzle-solving competitors—whose outcomes had been then copied into transactions on the blockchain. By then, bold bitcoiners had been already growing customized mining microprocessors only for producing this unusual new type of cash, and Bitcoin’s ingenious system meant that any single unhealthy actor who may wish to write a false transaction into the blockchain must use a set of computer systems that possessed extra computational energy than all these many 1000’s of miners. It was an excellent method that added as much as a safe forex with no central authority.
