Elie Bursztein
More info
- Organization
- Known for
- SHAttered (2017), CAPTCHA research
French researcher at Google with a habit of proving that security mechanisms merely look secure.
Bursztein earned his PhD at ENS Cachan and joined Google, where he led research on abuse and fraud. Early on, he and colleagues at Stanford showed that a large share of the web's text and audio CAPTCHAs could be solved automatically with generic tools, a result that helped push the industry towards behaviour-based checks.
In 2017 he co-authored SHAttered with Marc Stevens and CWI: the first public SHA-1 collision, two different PDFs with the same hash. The computation came to roughly 6,500 CPU-years and 110 GPU-years, which Google happened to have lying around. SHA-1 had been theoretically broken since 2005; it took two concrete files for the industry to stop negotiating. He has since turned to AI and security.