Security and Privacy of Blockchain Protocols and Applications

The PhD thesis by Sergei Tikhomirov prepared in 2016 – 2020 at the University of Luxembourg under the supervision of Professor Alex Biryukov and defended on 17 September 2020. The thesis consists of three parts:

1. Part 1: Network privacy in Bitcoin and privacy-focused cryptocurrencies
2. Part 2: Privacy of the Lightning Network
3. Part 3: Security of Ethereum smart contracts

See tikhomirov-thesis.pdf for the final version in PDF (identical to the file in the official repository). See tikhomirov-phd-defense-slides.pdf for the presentation (see also: animated version in Google slides, video of the defense).

Build

1. Clone the repository (download and unpack is also OK):

git clone git@github.com:s-tikhomirov/phd-thesis.git

1. Open main.tex in TeXstudio
2. Press F5
3. See the result as main.pdf

To replace the title page with the official title page from the University of Luxembourg (generated from an official .docx template), run:

./replace-title-page.sh

See the result as tikhomirov-thesis.pdf.

Toolset

The following software was used while preparing this thesis:

• Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS
• Sublime Text 3.2.2
• TeXstudio 2.12.6 (with texlive-full)
• JabRef 5.1--2020-03-18--99183e1
• lacheck.lex, v 1.26
• language tool
• TeXtidote
• Grammarly

Acknowledgments

In addition to the people I thank in the dedicated "Acknowledgments" section, I thank all the TeX StackExchange contributors who helped me solve so many weird TeX problems. That would take me forever to fix on my own. Why don't we write theses in Markdown?..

For the soundtrack for my writing process, I thank Silk Music and Shingo Nakamura, ChilledCow (yes, the famous "study girl"), and Alexander Nuzhdin's FM Café.