A Survey on Security and Privacy Issues of Bitcoin

By Mauro Conti, Surinder Kumar, Chhagan Lal, Sushmita Ruj. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2017

969 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency that records all transactions in a distributed append-only public ledger called blockchain. The security of Bitcoin heavily relies on the incentive-compatible proof-of-work (PoW) based distributed consensus protocol, which is run by the network nodes called miners. In exchange for the incentive, the miners are expected to maintain the blockchain honestly. Since its launch in 2009, Bitcoin economy has grown at an enormous rate, and it is now worth about 150 billions of dollars. This exponential growth in the market value of bitcoins motivate adversaries to exploit weaknesses for profit, and researchers to discover new vulnerabilities in the system, propose countermeasures, and predict upcoming trends. In this paper, we present a systematic survey that covers the security and privacy aspects of Bitcoin. We start by giving an overview of the Bitcoin system and its major components along with their functionality and interactions within the system. We review the existing vulnerabilities in Bitcoin and its major underlying technologies such as blockchain and PoW-based consensus protocol. These vulnerabilities lead to the execution of various security threats to the standard functionality of Bitcoin. We then investigate the feasibility and robustness of the state-of-the-art security solutions. Additionally, we discuss the current anonymity considerations in Bitcoin and the privacy-related threats to Bitcoin users along with the analysis of the existing privacy-preserving solutions. Finally, we summarize the critical open challenges, and we suggest directions for future research towards provisioning stringent security and privacy solutions for Bitcoin.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1973f0f8815ec63abd21b0e191846efa2041125a

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Citations in the corpus

Blockchain for Future Smart Grid: A Comprehensive Survey (2019, background): “act may also be vulnerable to malicious attacks, since the contracts are built on programming codes. These codes may contain vulnerabilities and bugs which open malicious parties to exploit. In [108]–[110] such malicious attacks against the blockchain and smart contract are described. Hence, it is c”
Blockchain Technology Implementation in Logistics (2019, background): “Moreover, it is a cryptographically secure electronic payment system, and it enables transactions involving virtual currency in the form of digital tokens called Bitcoin (BTC or bitcoins) [22].”
When Mobile Blockchain Meets Edge Computing (2017, background): “This consensus mechanism guarantees the security and dependability of blockchain systems [4], [5].”
A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms and Mining Strategy Management in Blockchain Networks (2018, background): “A systematic survey is conducted in [20] with respect to the security in the Bitcoin network including the identified attacks on the consensus mechanisms and the privacy/anonymity issues of the Bitcoin clients.”
Integrated Blockchain and Edge Computing Systems: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges (2019, background): “2) Security and Privacy: Despite the original security and privacy issues of blockchain [96], outsourcing services at the edges in the integrated system of blockchain and edge computing presents new security and privacy challenges.”
Blockchain for Internet of Things: A Survey (2019, background): “For example, it is shown in [21] that user pseudonyms can be cracked via learning and inferring the multiple transactions associated with one”
Blockchain Technologies for the Internet of Things: Research Issues and Challenges (2018, background): “Although the above-mentioned surveys [7], [24], [31], [32] have laid a solid foundation for blockchain technologies, our survey differs in several aspects.”
Security and Privacy on Blockchain (2019, background): “itcoin systematically, including risks and attacks in Bitcoin like digital currency systems. They also described and evaluated mitigation strategies to eliminate some of the risks. Mauro Conti et al. [32] reviewed security and privacy of Bitcoin, including existing loopholes, which lead to various s”
Who Are the Phishers? Phishing Scam Detection on Ethereum via Network Embedding (2019, background): “Besides, among various security issues of blockchain digital cryptocurrency, the number of phishing scams accounts for more than 50% of all cybercrimes in Ethereum since 2017 and this kind of scam has become as a main threat to trading security of Ethereum [7].”
A Survey on Ethereum Systems Security (2019, background): “There are surveys that focus on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies [23], [24], [25], which use a transaction-centered model known as unspent transaction outputs (UTXO).”
Privacy-Preserving Solutions for Blockchain: Review and Challenges (2019, background): “In addition to privacy challenges, when it comes to security issues, vulnerabilities and attacks in cryptocurrencies, the reader is referred to the survey paper [29], where authors”
A Vademecum on Blockchain Technologies: When, Which, and How (2019, background): “strategies [226]; starting from withholding (relay-delay [227]), ending with net-split and gold-finger attacks [7].”