Fidelity Investments Inc has become the first financial institution to join the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies & Contracts, a group of academic institutions and technology companies looking to develop blockchain-based technology.

Fidelity Labs, the innovation arm of asset manager Fidelity, will be a member of IC3 along with Cornell University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the Technion, IBM Corp and Intel Corp, the company said in a statement.

The Boston-based fund manager will collaborate with the group to develop blockchain programs to help make financial systems more efficient and secure.

Read the full article on Reuters.

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“One of the hazards of algorithmic, as opposed to human, detection, is that an attacker who can reverse-engineer a machine can almost certainly find a way to make dangerous objects appear benign,” said Ari Juels, a computer science professor at Cornell University.

“Countermeasures may be possible, but the research community does not yet have a good sense of how to construct them.”

Read the full article on The Guardian.

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That ability to adapt and change to defeat cyberthieves shows how blockchain technology can be made secure, says Prof Ari Juels, a computer scientist at Cornell University and co-director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts which studies the technology and its uses.

“Ethereum has showed just how resilient crypto-currencies can be in the way that it has unwound the damage done by the attacker,” he says, adding that it, and virtual currencies in general, are still going through some “growing pains”.

Read the full article on BBC News.

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For the first time, developers can download and install Chain Core to start or join a Blockchain network, build financial applications, and access in-depth technical documentation and tutorials. Users have the option to run their prototypes on a test network, or “testnet,” operated by Chain, Microsoft, and the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), a collaboration of Cornell University, Cornell Tech, UC Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Technion.

Read the full article on Blockchain News.

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Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Cornell Tech say that they’ve trained a piece of software that can undermine the privacy benefits of standard content-masking techniques like blurring and pixelation by learning to read or see what’s meant to be hidden in images—anything from a blurred house number to a pixelated human face in the background of a photo. And they didn’t even need to painstakingly develop extensive new image uncloaking methodologies to do it. Instead, the team found that mainstream machine learning methods—the process of “training” a computer with a set of example data rather than programming it—lend themselves readily to this type of attack.

“The techniques we’re using in this paper are very standard in image recognition, which is a disturbing thought,” says Vitaly Shmatikov, one of the authors from Cornell Tech. 

Read the full article on WIRED.

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In 2008, short of sending a suitcase full of cash, there was essentially just one way for an individual to send money between, say, the United States and Europe. You had to wire the money through a mainstream financial service, like Western Union or a bank. That meant paying high fees and waiting up to several days for the money to arrive.

A radically new option arose in 2009 with the introduction of bitcoin. Bitcoin makes it possible to transfer value between two individuals anywhere in the world quickly and at minimal cost. It is often called a “cryptocurrency,” as it is purely digital and uses cryptography to protect against counterfeiting. The software that executes this cryptography runs simultaneously on computers around the world. Even if one or more of these computers is misused in an attempt to corrupt the bitcoin network (such as to steal money), the collective action of the others ensures the integrity of the system as a whole. Its distributed nature also enables bitcoin to process transactions without the fees, antiquated networks and (for better or worse) the rules governing intermediaries like banks and wire services.

Read the full blog on The Conversation.

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“This is, in our view, a pretty big deal,” says Ari Juels, a professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, in New York City. “Websites should be changing their password policies to make users’ lives easier. The security degradation is pretty small.”

On the face of it, letting passwords with typos unlock an account sounds like a bad idea. After all, an attacker trying to guess your password wouldn’t need to get it exactly right. Facebook has been criticized for allowing people to log in even when they get the case of their password’s first character wrong, or accidentally have caps lock on.

Read the full article in the MIT Technology Review.

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FOR ANYONE WITH minimalist tastes or an inability to use copy-paste keyboard shortcuts, URL shorteners may seem like a perfectly helpful convenience. Unfortunately, the same tools that turn long web addresses into a few characters also offer the same conveniences to hackers—including any of them motivated enough to try millions of shortened URLs until they hit on the one you thought was private.

That’s the lesson for companies including Google, Microsoft, and Bit.ly in a paper published today by researchers at Cornell Tech. The researchers’ work demonstrates the unexpected privacy-invasive potential of “brute-forcing” shortened URLs: By guessing at shortened URLs until they found working ones, the researchers say that they could have pulled off tricks ranging from spreading malware on unwitting victims’ computers via Microsoft’s cloud storage service to finding out who requested Google Maps directions to abortion providers or drug addiction treatment facilities.

 Read the full article on WIRED.

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Factions in the community are arguing over proposals to adjust Bitcoin’s software so it can handle more than a measly seven transactions a second across the whole world. Yet no tweak to Bitcoin could allow transactions at a scale close to that of conventional payment processors such as Visa without compromising the digital currency’s decentralized design, says Ari Juels, a cryptographer and professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, and a coauthor of the study. Visa’s system processes 2,000 transactions per second on average and can handle up to 56,000 transactions per second, the company says.

“The current debate is missing the forest for the trees,” says Juels. “We have to think in terms of a fundamental redesign if we’re going to see robust scaling in Bitcoin.” Juels worked on the new study with 11 other researchers from Cornell, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Maryland, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and the National University of Singapore. The group’s analysis is being presented in a position paper at the Financial Cryptography and Data Security conference in Barbados later this month.

Read the full article on MIT Tech Review.

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Without such a switch, Trump would have to convince others to help him close off the Internet. Preventing ISIS operatives abroad from going online at all would be impossible — the group already controls Internet infrastructure in its territory; it has used this power to ban some citizens from getting online. Even if Trump somehow convinced a head of state to cut off their country’s Internet in the name of security, the move would overwhelmingly affect people unassociated with ISIS. “It would be a human rights catastrophe,” says Thomas Ristenpart, a computer science professor at Cornell University.

Read the full article on TIME.

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