Related papers: Bitcoin over Tor isn't a good idea
The Bitcoin Lightning Network is a layer 2 protocol designed to facilitate fast and inexpensive Bitcoin transactions. It operates by establishing channels between users, where Bitcoin is locked and transactions are conducted off-chain until…
Like many routing protocols, the Tor anonymity network has decentralized path selection, in clients locally and independently choose paths. As a result, network resources may be left idle, leaving the system in a suboptimal state. This is…
A proof of the security of the Bitcoin protocol is made rigorous, and simplified in certain parts. A computational model in which an adversary can delay transmission of blocks by time $\Delta$ is considered. The protocol is generalized to…
Previous attacks that link the sender and receiver of traffic in the Tor network ("correlation attacks") have generally relied on analyzing traffic from TCP connections. The TCP connections of a typical client application, however, are…
A major limitation of open P2P networks is the lack of strong identities. This allows any agent to attack the system by creating multiple false personas, thereby disrupting the overlay network's connectivity and sabotaging its operation. In…
A recent spam wave of IP addresses in the Bitcoin P2P network allowed us to estimate the degree distribution of reachable peers in the network. The resulting distribution shows that about every second reachable peer runs with Bitcoin Core's…
In this work we show that Tor is vulnerable to app deanonymization attacks on Android devices through network traffic analysis. For this purpose, we describe a general methodology for performing an attack that allows to deanonymize the apps…
Off-Chain transactions allow for the immediate transfer of Cryptocurrency between two parties, without delays or unavoidable transaction fees. Such capabilities are critical for mainstream Cryptocurrency adaption. They allow for the…
Clients of permissionless blockchain systems, like Bitcoin, rely on an underlying peer-to-peer network to send and receive transactions. It is critical that a client is connected to at least one honest peer, as otherwise the client can be…
Bitcoin's design promises resilience through decentralization, yet the physical infrastructure supporting the network creates hidden dependencies. We present the first longitudinal study of Bitcoin's resilience to submarine cable failures,…
Bitcoin and Ethereum, whose miners arguably collectively comprise the most powerful computational resource in the history of mankind, offer no more power for processing and verifying transactions than a typical smart phone. The system…
Tor users are vulnerable to deanonymization by an adversary that can observe some Tor relays or some parts of the network. We demonstrate that previous network-aware path-selection algorithms that propose to solve this problem are…
Determining the trust of an individual Bitcoin wallet is a difficult problem. There are no ratings, that offer vendors or exchanges meaningful information about the level of the taint of Bitcoins they are receiving. Lack of such information…
A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…
The Bitcoin Lightning network is a mechanism to enable fast and inexpensive off-chain Bitcoin transactions using peer-to-peer (P2P) channels between nodes that can also be composed into a routing path. Although the resulting possible…
Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a new form of digital money that has not escaped the eyes of cyber-attackers. Traditionally, they have been maliciously used as a medium of exchange for proceeds of crime in the cyber dark-market by…
The famous new money Bitcoin is classified as a technical informational money (TIM). Besides introducing the idea of a TIM, a more extreme notion of informational money will be developed: exclusively informational money (EXIM). The…
The Tor network is a widely used system for anonymous communication. However, Tor is known to be vulnerable to attackers who can observe traffic at both ends of the communication path. In this paper, we show that prior attacks are just the…
There is growing interest in providing programmatic access to the value locked in Bitcoin, which famously offers limited programmability itself. Various approaches have been put forth in recent years, with the vast majority of proposed…
The Tor anonymous network has become quite popular with regular users on the Internet. In the Tor network, an anonymous path is created by selecting three relays through which the connection is redirected. Nevertheless, as the number of Tor…