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Bitcoin over Tor isn't a good idea
Biryukov, Alex; Pustogarov, Ivan
2014In 2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Peer reviewed
 

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Keywords :
Tor; Bitcoin; anonymity; double-spending
Abstract :
[en] Bitcoin is a decentralized P2P digital currency in which coins are generated by a distributed set of miners and transaction are broadcasted via a peer-to-peer network. While Bitcoin provides some level of anonymity (or rather pseudonymity) by encouraging the users to have any number of random-looking Bitcoin addresses, recent research shows that this level of anonymity is rather low. This encourages users to connect to the Bitcoin network through anonymizers like Tor and motivates development of default Tor functionality for popular mobile SPV clients. In this paper we show that combining Tor and Bitcoin creates an attack vector for the deterministic and stealthy man-in-the-middle attacks. A low-resource attacker can gain full control of information flows between all users who chose to use Bitcoin over Tor. In particular the attacker can link together user’s transactions regardless of pseudonyms used, control which Bitcoin blocks and transactions are relayed to the user and can delay or discard user’s transactions and blocks. In collusion with a powerful miner double-spending attacks become possible and a totally virtual Bitcoin reality can be created for such set of users.
Disciplines :
Computer science
Author, co-author :
Biryukov, Alex ;  University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC) ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT)
Pustogarov, Ivan ;  University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC)
External co-authors :
no
Language :
English
Title :
Bitcoin over Tor isn't a good idea
Publication date :
November 2014
Event name :
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2015
Event organizer :
IEEE Computer Society
Event place :
San Jose, CA, United States
Event date :
May 17-21, 2015
Main work title :
2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Publisher :
IEEE Computer Society
ISBN/EAN :
978-1-4673-6949-7
Pages :
122-134
Peer reviewed :
Peer reviewed
Available on ORBilu :
since 10 November 2014

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