Deanonymisation of Clients in Bitcoin P2P Network

By Alex Biryukov, Dmitry Khovratovich, I. Pustogarov. Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2014

564 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4b92eccc5bc7ededff579232f5bed5186bf8302

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Citations in the corpus

Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin's Peer-to-Peer Network (2015, background): “Today, an attacker with enough addresses can eclipse any victim that accepts incoming connections and then restarts.”
Privacy-Preserving Solutions for Blockchain: Review and Challenges (2019, background): “the public addresses used in the blockchain, another blockchain network node could link the address with a wallet and real user, despite the supposed anonymity of new randomly generated addresses [71].”
Blockchain challenges and opportunities: a survey (2018, methodology): “In [19], each client can be uniquely identified by a set of nodes it connects to.”
TumbleBit: An Untrusted Bitcoin-Compatible Anonymous Payment Hub (2017, unknown): “Higher fees are paid for larger transactions.”
Applications of Blockchains in the Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey (2019, background): “Singular blockchain addresses can be traced back publicly and can reveal user identities [123].”
An Overview of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Consensus, and Future Trends (2017, methodology): “In [11], each client can be uniquely identified by a set of nodes it connects to.”
A Survey of Blockchain From the Perspectives of Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities (2019, background): “Privacy leakage may also happen within the blockchain, although the system claims to be extensively secured as users only make transactions with digital signatures that associate public-private key encryption [14].”
An Empirical Analysis of Traceability in the Monero Blockchain (2017, background): “While Bitcoin, the ﬁrst and currently largest cryptocurrency, explicitly identiﬁes which coin in the transaction graph is being spent, Cryptonote allows users to obscure the transaction graph by including chaﬀ transaction inputs called “mixins” (this is visualized in Figure 1).”
Bitcoin and Beyond: A Technical Survey on Decentralized Digital Currencies (2016, methodology): “However, [72] point out that it is possible for an attacker to trigger a ban of Tor connections to the Bitcoin network.”
A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms and Mining Strategy Management in Blockchain Networks (2018, background): “In [36] and [89], examination on the block propagation delay T in (5) shows that a”
Zether: Towards Privacy in a Smart Contract World (2020, methodology): “Even if an anonymous network like Tor [81] is used, cryptocurrencies can be attacked [6].”
Decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum Networks (2018, background): “[4] examined how peer neighbors discover IP addresses that correspond to pseudonymous identities.”