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- Authors:
- Alex Biryukov University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg
University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg
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- Dmitry Khovratovich University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg
University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg
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- Ivan Pustogarov University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg
University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg
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CCS '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications SecurityNovember 2014Pages 15–29https://doi.org/10.1145/2660267.2660379
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CCS '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Deanonymisation of Clients in Bitcoin P2P Network
Pages 15–29
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ABSTRACT
Bitcoin is a digital currency which relies on a distributed set of miners to mint coins and on a peer-to-peer network to broadcast transactions. The identities of Bitcoin users are hidden behind pseudonyms (public keys) which are recommended to be changed frequently in order to increase transaction unlinkability.
We present an efficient method to deanonymize Bitcoin users, which allows to link user pseudonyms to the IP addresses where the transactions are generated. Our techniques work for the most common and the most challenging scenario when users are behind NATs or firewalls of their ISPs. They allow to link transactions of a user behind a NAT and to distinguish connections and transactions of different users behind the same NAT. We also show that a natural countermeasure of using Tor or other anonymity services can be cut-off by abusing anti-DoS countermeasures of the Bitcoin network. Our attacks require only a few machines and have been experimentally verified. The estimated success rate is between 11% and 60% depending on how stealthy an attacker wants to be. We propose several countermeasures to mitigate these new attacks.
References
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- Bitnodes. https://github.com/ayeowch/bitnodes, 2014.Google Scholar
- BlockChain.info. https://blockchain.info/charts, 2014.Google Scholar
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- P. Koshy, D. Koshy, and P. McDaniel. An analysis of anonymity in bitcoin using P2P network traffic. In Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC'14). Springer, 2014.Google ScholarCross Ref
- S. Lerner. New vulnerability: know your peer public addresses in 14 minutes. https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=135856, 2014.Google Scholar
- S. Meiklejohn, M. Pomarole, G. Jordan, K. Levchenko, D. McCoy, G. M. Voelker, and S. Savage. A fistful of bitcoins: Characterizing payments among men with no names. In Proceedings of Conference on Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'13). ACM, 2013. Google ScholarDigital Library
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Cited By
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Index Terms
Deanonymisation of Clients in Bitcoin P2P Network
Applied computing
Electronic commerce
Digital cash
Security and privacy
Network security
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Reviews
Subhankar Ray
Detailed descriptions of some parts of the bitcoin code that are not documented well are contained in this paper. Those trying to understand how the bitcoin code works should read this paper to start their journey. However, I am concerned about the knowledge and "hacking" techniques described in the paper for deanonymization of clients. Because core developers are changing the code regularly and can make this paper obsolete quickly, even elegant stochastic processes to measure different limits and bounds may produce different results as the code base is changing. At the same time, I understand that the authors' goal is to make this paper obsolete as quickly as possible for the safety and security of bitcoin. This is a novel approach to deanonymize clients while they are behind firewalls or network address translation (NAT). This technique will be useful in other networks and applications. The attack also needs a limited amount of resources, and will also work if "bitcoin encrypts the connection." The techniques and probing used in this paper relate to the usage of the GETADDR, ADDR, and INVENTORY messages and that of the time stamps by the bitcoin protocol. The deanonymization process described in the paper has four steps. In step 1, it gets the list of bitcoin servers. In step 2, it composes the nodes it wants to deanonymize. In step 3, it maps clients to their entry nodes using some knowledge about the topology of the network. In step 4, transactions are mapped to entry nodes running in parallel to steps 1 to 3. This paper also describes "how to decrease block mining difficulty by creating an alternative blockchain." The attack described in the paper prohibits bitcoin servers from accepting connections via Tor or other similar services (section 3). This is not very practical, and parties looking to stay anonymous may stop using the system until they have access to such a service. Interestingly, once such a service is available, the proposed attack may not be able to deanonymize clients who are not using Tor or other similar services. Nevertheless, this paper is a good contribution toward making the bitcoin network more secure. Online Computing Reviews Service
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CCS '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
November 2014
1592 pages
ISBN:9781450329576
DOI:10.1145/2660267
- General Chair:
- Gail-Joon Ahn
Arizona State University, USA
, - Program Chairs:
- Moti Yung
Google -- Columbia University, USA
, - Ninghui Li
Purdue University, USA
Copyright © 2014 ACM
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [emailprotected].
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Publication History
- Published: 3 November 2014
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Author Tags
- anonymity
- bitcoin
- p2p
- tor
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CCS '14 Paper Acceptance Rate114of585submissions,19%Overall Acceptance Rate1,261of6,999submissions,18%
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