Adam Back
Adam Back | |
---|---|
Born | Adam Back July 1970 (age 54) London, England, UK |
Nationality | British |
Occupation | Cryptographer |
Known for | hashcash, Blockstream |
Website | http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/ |
Adam Back (born July 1970) is a British cryptographer and crypto-hacker.
He is the inventor of hashcash, the proof-of-work system used by several anti-spam systems. A similar system is used in bitcoin.[1] Hashcash has also been used in a number of other protocols such as combating blog spam,[2] and defending against user namespace pollution.[3]
He implemented credlib,[4] a library that implements the credential systems of Stefan Brands and David Chaum.
He was the first to formalize the Non-Interactive Forward-Secrecy[5] security property for email and to observe that any Identity Based Encryption scheme can be used to provide Non-Interactive Forward Secrecy.
He is also known for pioneering the use of ultra-compact code with his 3-line RSA in Perl[6] signature file and non-exportable T-shirts[7] to protest the (now relaxed) United States cryptography export regulations.
Today he is CEO of Blockstream, a company that seeks to further the development of bitcoin and blockchain technology.[8]
He has a computer science Ph.D. from University of Exeter.
See also
References
- ^ "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" (PDF).
- ^ "hashcash.org - blog plugins". hashcash.org.
- ^ "I2P's Threat Model". i2p2.de.
- ^ "credlib - Credential Library". cypherspace.org.
- ^ "Non-Interactive Forward Secrecy". cypherspace.org.
- ^ "export-a-crypto-system sig". cypherspace.org.
- ^ "Munitions T-shirt". cypherspace.org.
- ^ "Blockstream". blockstream.com.
External links