[en] 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.
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)
TIKHOMIROV, Sergei ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC)
External co-authors :
no
Language :
English
Title :
Transaction Clustering Using Network Traffic Analysis for Bitcoin and Derived Blockchains
Publication date :
2019
Event name :
2nd Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains for Distributed Systems (CryBlock) at IEEE INFOCOM 2019