Research talks are informal sessions held for faculty and students. These talks are not webcast, nor recorded, due to informal nature and topic relevance.
CERT and SEI Training schedules, as well as other related events can also be found on this list.
Seminar: Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large online anonymous marketplace
| Date: | October 8, 2012 |
| Talk Title: | Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large online anonymous marketplace |
| Speaker: | Nicolas Christin |
| Time & Location: | 12:00pm - 1:00pm CIC Building, Pittsburgh |
Abstract
We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road, an anonymous,
international online marketplace that operates as a Tor hidden service and
uses Bitcoin as its exchange currency. We gather and analyze data over eight
months between the end of 2011 and 2012, including daily crawls of the
marketplace for nearly six months in 2012.
We obtain a detailed picture of the type of goods being sold on Silk Road,
and of the revenues made both by sellers and Silk Road operators.
We further show that the marketplace has been operating steadily, with daily
sales and number of sellers overall increasing over the past few months. We
discuss economic and policy implications of our analysis and results. Speaker Bio
Nicolas Christin is the Associate Director of the Information Networking Institute (INI), where he is also faculty and a CyLab Senior Systems Scientist. He was previously a resident faculty in our research and education center in Japan, CyLab Japan, located in Kōbe, Hyōgo Prefecture. He also serves as Faculty Advisor for INI's Master's of Information Technology-Information Security (MSIT-IS).