Related papers: De-anonymizing BitTorrent Users on Tor
Bitcoin is one of the decentralized cryptocurrencies powered by a peer-to-peer blockchain network. Parties who trade in the bitcoin network are not required to disclose any personal information. Such property of anonymity, however,…
The Lightning Network is a scaling solution for Bitcoin that promises to enable rapid and private payment processing. In Lightning, multi-hop payments are secured by utilizing Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) and encrypted on the…
As the needs of Internet users and applications significantly changed over the last decade, inter-domain routing became more important to fulfill these needs. The ways how data flows over the Internet are still completely in the hand of…
Privacy-minded Internet service operators anonymize IPv6 addresses by truncating them to a fixed length, perhaps due to long-standing use of this technique with IPv4 and a belief that it's "good enough." We claim that simple anonymization…
The Tor network is the most prominent system for providing anonymous communication to web users, with a daily user base of 2 million users. However, since its inception, it has been constantly targeted by various traffic fingerprinting and…
Peer-to-peer swarming protocols have been proven to be very efficient for content replication over Internet. This fact has certainly motivated proposals to adapt these protocols to meet the requirements of on-demand streaming system. The…
Payment channel networks, and the Lightning Network in particular, seem to offer a solution to the lack of scalability and privacy offered by Bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Previous research has focused on the…
In the cryptographic currency Bitcoin, all transactions are recorded in the blockchain - a public, global, and immutable ledger. Because transactions are public, Bitcoin and its users employ obfuscation to maintain a degree of financial…
One of the defining features of Bitcoin and the thousands of cryptocurrencies that have been derived from it is a globally visible transaction ledger. While Bitcoin uses pseudonyms as a way to hide the identity of its participants, a long…
Internet users increasingly rely on commercial virtual private network (VPN) services to protect their security and privacy. The VPN services route the client's traffic over an encrypted tunnel to a VPN gateway in the cloud. Thus, they hide…
Decentralized unpermissioned peer-to-peer networks are inherently vulnerable to spam when they allow arbitrary participants to submit content to a common public index or registry; preventing this is difficult due to the absence of a central…
Peer-to-peer (P2P) locality has recently raised a lot of interest in the community. Indeed, whereas P2P content distribution enables financial savings for the content providers, it dramatically increases the traffic on inter-ISP links. To…
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing is becoming increasingly popular in recent years. In 2012, it was reported that P2P traffic consumed over 5,374 petabytes per month, which accounted for approximately 20.5% of consumer internet traffic. TV is…
In this paper, we analyze the topology and the content found on the "darknet", the set of websites accessible via Tor. We created a darknet spider and crawled the darknet starting from a bootstrap list by recursively following links. We…
Web browsers provide the security foundation for our online experiences. Significant research has been done into the security of browsers themselves, but relatively little investigation has been done into how they interact with the…
We focus on the problem of botnet orchestration and discuss how attackers can leverage decentralised technologies to dynamically control botnets with the goal of having botnets that are resilient against hostile takeovers. We cover critical…
Anonymity networks hide user identities with the help of relayed anonymity routers. However, the state-of-the-art anonymity networks do not provide an effective trust model. As a result, users cannot circumvent malicious or vulnerable…
Since the beginning of the digital area, privacy and anonymity have been impacted drastically (both, positively and negatively), by the different technologies developed for communications purposes. The broad possibilities that the Internet…
Cloud providers' support for network evasion techniques that misrepresent the server's domain name is more prevalent than previously believed, which has serious implications for security and privacy due to the reliance on domain names in…
Peer-to-peer protocols play an increasingly instrumental role in Internet content distribution. Consequently, it is important to gain a full understanding of how these protocols behave in practice and how their parameters impact overall…