Ethan Heilman

Biography:

I am a PhD student in Boston University's Computer Science Department and a member of the security research group BUSec. I am being advised by Sharon Goldberg. I have done research on novel attacks on hash functions, differential cryptanalysis, Intelligent Transit Systems and cache based side channel attacks. I broke SHA3 contestant Spectral Hash. My current focus is on the RPKI and Bitcoin.

Prior to graduate school I worked as a software engineer at the Broad Institute where I wrote microbial bioinformatics annotation software. I've also worked as a software developer at two successful startups, Pubget and Jumptap. In my free time I write games, experiment with web application technology, and blog about security.

My email address is ethan.r.heilman@gmail.com, my github, on twitter @Ethan_Heilman and my CV is available here.

Publications:

The Arwen Trading Protocols
Ethan Heilman, Sebastien Lipmann, Sharon Goldberg

The rewards of selfish mining: technical perspective
Sharon Goldberg, Ethan Heilman
Communications of the ACM,

Low-Resource Eclipse Attacks on Ethereum's Peer-to-Peer Network
Yuval Marcus, Ethan Heilman, Sharon Goldberg

Cryptanalysis of Curl-P and Other Attacks on the IOTA Cryptocurrency
Ethan Heilman, Neha Narula, Garrett Tanzer, James Lovejoy, Michael Colavita, Madars Virza, Tadge Dryja
Vulnerability Disclosure and Proof-of-Concept
BlackHat USA (2018), Las Vegas, USA, August 2018
Real World Crypto (2019), San Jose, USA, January 2019

An Empirical Analysis of Traceability in the Monero Blockchain
Malte Möser, Kyle Soska, Ethan Heilman, Kevin Lee, Henry Heffan, Shashvat Srivastava, Kyle Hogan, Jason Hennessey, Andrew Miller, Arvind Narayanan, and Nicolas Christin
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies,Barcelona, Spain 2018

Atomically Trading with Roger: Gambling on the success of a hardfork
Patrick McCorry, Ethan Heilman, Andrew Miller
blog post
International Workshop on Data Privacy Management Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology (2018), Oslo, Sweden, September 2017

TumbleBit: An Untrusted Tumbler for Bitcoin-Compatible Anonymous Payments
Ethan Heilman, Foteini Baldimtsi, Leen Alshenibr, Alessandra Scafuro, Sharon Goldberg
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2017, San Diego, California, February 2017.
project page

Blindly Signed Contracts: Anonymous On-Blockchain and Off-Blockchain Bitcoin Transactions
Ethan Heilman, Foteini Baldimtsi, Sharon Goldberg
3rd Workshop on Bitcoin and Blockchain Research at 2oth International Conference of Financial Cryptography, Barbados, February 2016.

Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network
Ethan Heilman, Alison Kendler, Aviv Zohar, Sharon Goldberg
24th USENIX Security Symposium, Washington, DC., August 2015.
project page

From the Consent of the Routed: Improving the Transparency of the RPKI
Ethan Heilman, Danny Cooper, Leonid Reyzin and Sharon Goldberg.
SIGCOMM'14, Chicago, IL. August 2014.

On the risk of misbehaving RPKI authorities
D Cooper, E Heilman, K Brogle, L Reyzin, S Goldberg
Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, 2013
Awarded a 2014 IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize.

One Weird Trick to Stop Selfish Miners: Fresh Bitcoins, A Solution for the Honest Miner.
E Heilman
Poster at FC'14, 2014

Restoring the differential security of MD6.
Ethan Heilman, ECRYPT II Hash Workshop, 2011

Attacks Against Permute-Transform-Xor Compression Functions and Spectral Hash.
Ethan Heilman, NIST Mailing List and IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2009

Developing low-cost AVL and Web Mapping for Real-Time Intermodal Customer Information Using a GPS Cell Phones and Google Maps
U Shama, L Harman, E Heilman, J Baltikauskas, NCUR, 2007

Selected Blog Entries:

A Brief History of NSA Backdoors

GCHQ Deception Slides Were Cribbed from Bell and Whaley’s Book ‘Cheating and Deception’ (1982)

Spectral Hash Broken

Proving the Differential Resistance of MD6

Play Flip It:

Instructions can be found here.