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See detailTransaction Clustering Using Network Traffic Analysis for Bitcoin and Derived Blockchains
Biryukov, Alex UL; Tikhomirov, Sergei UL

in IEEE INFOCOM 2019 Workshop Proceedings (2019)

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency introduced in 2008 and launched in 2009. Bitcoin provides a way to transact without any trusted intermediary, but its privacy guarantees are questionable, and ... [more ▼]

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency introduced in 2008 and launched in 2009. Bitcoin provides a way to transact without any trusted intermediary, but its privacy guarantees are questionable, and multiple deanonymization attacks have been proposed. Cryptocurrency privacy research has been mostly focused on blockchain analysis, i.e., extracting information from the transaction graph. We focus on another vector for privacy attacks: network analysis. We describe the message propagation mechanics in Bitcoin and propose a novel technique for transaction clustering based on network traffic analysis. We show that timings of transaction messages leak information about their origin, which can be exploited by a well connected adversarial node. We implement and evaluate our method in the Bitcoin testnet with a high level of accuracy, deanonymizing our own transactions issued from a desktop wallet (Bitcoin Core) and from a mobile (Mycelium) wallet. Compared to existing approaches, we leverage the propagation information from multiple peers, which allows us to overcome an anti-deanonymization technique (“diffusion”) used in Bitcoin. [less ▲]

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See detailPortrait of a Miner in a Landscape
Biryukov, Alex UL; Feher, Daniel UL

in IEEE INFOCOM 2019 Workshop Proceedings (2019)

Mining is one of the core elements of the proof-of-work based cryptocurrency economy. In this paper we investigate the generic landscape and hierarchy of miners on the example of Ethereum and Zcash, two ... [more ▼]

Mining is one of the core elements of the proof-of-work based cryptocurrency economy. In this paper we investigate the generic landscape and hierarchy of miners on the example of Ethereum and Zcash, two blockchains that are among the top 5 in terms of USD value of created coins. Both chains used ASIC resistant proofs-of-work which favors GPU mining in order to keep mining decentralized. This however has changed with recent introduction of ASIC miners for these chains. This transition allows us to develop methods that might detect hidden ASIC mining in a chain (if it exists), and to study how the introduction of ASICs effects the decentralization of mining power. Finally, we describe how an attacker might use public blockchain information to invalidate the privacy of miners, deducing the mining hardware of individual miners and their mining rewards. [less ▲]

Detailed reference viewed: 231 (13 UL)