Elie Bursztein

In 2014 Bursztein published the first study on Account manual hijackers. With Kurt Thomas et al. he published how Google attempt to reduce phone verified account fraud. In 2015 with Kurt Thomas et al. he received the S&P best practical award for his study of malicious ads injectors. With Joseph Bonneau et al. he got the WWW'15 best student paper award for publishing the first practical study on secret questions security and usability using Google data.

In 2010 at Defcon he showed how to build a generic map hack software. In 2012 at Defcon he demonstrated how to fuzz online games including Diablo 3 and League of Legends. In 2014 at Defcon he showed how to use machine learning to predict what the opponent will play for the card based game Hearthstone. At Blizzard's request the tool was never made public.

In 2009 Bursztein presented the first complete analysis of the Microsoft DPAPI (Data Protection Application Programming Interface) with Jean Michel Picod. In 2011 with J. Lagarenne, M. Hamburg and D. Boneh he used private set intersection protocols to defend against game map hacking. In 2014 with Adam Langley he made Chrome on mobile roughly three times faster by implementing a new TLS cipher suite that uses the algorithms ChaCha20 and Poly1305.

In 2009, Bursztein showed with Steven Bethard that eBay audio captchas were broken. In 2010, he studied with S. Bethard, C. Fabry, D. Jurafsky and J. C. Mitchell how humans perform on real world CAPTCHAS by running a large-scale study. In 2011, he demonstrated with R. Beauxis, H. Paskov, D. Perito, C. Fabry and J. Mitchell that non-continuous audio CAPTCHA were ineffective. Bursztein was part of a team of Stanford researchers that broke NuCaptcha's security, despite the company's claims of being the "next generation" of video-based CAPTCHA security. He told CNET News in 2012 that "we are able to break NuCaptcha's video scheme with over 90 percent success."

Elie Bursztein obtained his computer engineering degree from EPITA in 2004, his master's degree in computer science from Paris 7/ ENS, in 2004 (under the supervision of Patrick Cousot) and his PhD in computer science from École Normale Supérieure de Cachan in 2008 (under the supervision of Jean Goubault-Larrecq). His PhD thesis tilted "Anticipation games. Théorie des jeux appliqués à la sécurité réseau" (Anticipation game. Game theory applied to network security) showed how to combine model-checking, temporal logic and game theory to find the optimal responses to network attacks. At Stanford University, he was a post-doctoral fellow with the Stanford Security Laboratory, a unit of the computer science department that focuses on network and computer security.

Elie Bursztein (born 1 June 1980) leads the anti-abuse research team at Google. He is best known for his research on anti-fraud and abuse, his novel attacks against web service and video games and his work on applied cryptography. Prior to Google Bursztein was a post-doctoral fellow in computer science at Stanford University, where he focused on CAPTCHAs security and usability.