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The Science of Crypto Forensics Survives a Court Battle—for Now
A jury convicted Roman Sterlingov of money laundering this month. His defense team says it will appeal, saying the crypto-tracing technique at the heart of the case is “pseudoscience.”
But beginning in late 2012 with the work of cryptographer Sarah Meiklejohn, now a professor at University College London, among others, researchers began to figure out ways to group crypto wallets together, revealing connections that implied shared ownership. While the government presented other forms of evidence it said tied Sterlingov to Bitcoin Fog, like analysis of IP addresses linking him to the ownership of the web domain, Ekeland believes the blockchain forensics was critical in convincing the jury of his guilt. The judge also took issue with the depiction of Chainalysis software as an inscrutable black box, on the grounds that the defense had been given information about its workings—Ekeland disputes this characterization—and pointed out that the underlying heuristics applied by the firm have been subject to peer review, even if its specific clustering methods have not been.
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