When Meiklejohn began school at Brown in 2004, she found cryptography. This department of laptop science appealed on to her puzzle habit—what was an encryption system, in spite of everything, however one other secret language demanding to be deciphered?
There was a maxim in cryptography, also known as Schneier’s regulation after the cryptographer Bruce Schneier. It asserted that anybody can develop an encryption system intelligent sufficient that they will’t themselves consider a option 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 might have a look at that “unbreakable” system and see a option 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 attraction of constructing and breaking codes drove her greater than any ideological drive to defeat surveillance. However like many cryptographers, she nonetheless got here to imagine within the want for actually unbreakable encryption, applied sciences that would carve out an area for delicate communications—whether or not dissidents organizing towards a repressive authorities or whistleblowers sharing secrets and techniques with journalists—the place no snoop might 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 condominium, 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, a superb and extremely completed laptop scientist. Lysyanskaya had herself studied beneath the legendary Ron Rivest, whose title was represented by the R within the RSA algorithm that fashioned the idea for many trendy encryption, used in all places from internet 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 regulation in additional than 30 years.
Lysyanskaya was on the time engaged on a pre-Bitcoin cryptocurrency referred to as eCash, first developed within the Nineteen Nineties by David Chaum, a cryptographer whose groundbreaking work on anonymity techniques had made attainable applied sciences from VPNs to Tor. After ending her undergraduate diploma, Meiklejohn started a grasp’s diploma at Brown beneath Lysyanskaya’s wing, researching strategies to make Chaum’s eCash, a really nameless cost system, extra scalable and environment friendly.
The cryptocurrency scheme they had been laboring to optimize was, Meiklejohn admits in hindsight, troublesome to think about working in observe. Not like Bitcoin, it had a significant issue: An nameless spender of eCash might primarily forge a coin and move it off to an unsuspecting recipient. When that recipient deposited the coin at a form of eCash financial institution, the financial institution might carry out a verify that may reveal the coin to be a forgery and the fraudster’s anonymity protections could possibly be stripped away to disclose the id of the unhealthy actor. However by then, the fraudster may 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 actual fact, eCash was based mostly on a mathematical method referred to as zero-knowledge proofs, which might set up the validity of a cost with out the financial institution or recipient studying anything in any respect in regards to the spender or their cash. That mathematical sleight of hand meant that eCash was provably safe. Schneier’s regulation didn’t apply: No quantity of cleverness or computing energy would ever be capable of undo its anonymity.
When Meiklejohn first heard about Bitcoin in 2011, she had began her PhD research at UCSD however was spending the summer season 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 cost system that individuals had been utilizing to purchase medication on websites just like the Silk Highway. Meiklejohn had moved on from her eCash research by then; she was busy with different analysis—techniques that may enable folks to pay highway tolls with out revealing their private actions, as an example, and a thermal digital camera method that exposed PIN codes typed into an ATM by searching 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 subsequent yr.
Then, at some point on a UCSD laptop science division group hike in late 2012, a younger UCSD analysis scientist named Kirill Levchenko prompt to Meiklejohn that maybe they need to begin trying 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 wished to mine the forex expend huge computing assets performing calculations— primarily an enormous, automated puzzle-solving competitors—whose outcomes had been then copied into transactions on the blockchain. By then, bold bitcoiners had been already creating customized mining microprocessors only for producing this unusual new type of cash, and Bitcoin’s ingenious system meant that any single unhealthy actor who would possibly need to write a false transaction into the blockchain must use a group of computer systems that possessed extra computational energy than all these many hundreds of miners. It was a superb strategy that added as much as a safe forex with no central authority.