Related papers: Identifying and characterizing Sybils in the Tor n…
The architectures of deployed anonymity systems such as Tor suffer from two key problems that limit user's trust in these systems. First, paths for anonymous communication are built without considering trust relationships between users and…
Social network based trust relationships present a critical foundation for designing trustworthy systems, such as Sybil defenses, secure routing, and anonymous/censorshipresilient communications. A key issue in the design of such systems,…
Tor onion services rely on long-lived introduction circuits to support anonymous rendezvous between clients and services. Although Tor incorporates defenses against traffic analysis, the introduction protocol retains deterministic routing…
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…
While most online social media accounts are controlled by humans, these platforms also host automated agents called social bots or sybil accounts. Recent literature reported on cases of social bots imitating humans to manipulate…
Privacy and anonymity of validators, especially regarding IP address linkability, are essential to protect the Ethereum network from various attacks. Network-level attacks, such as DoS, can interrupt validators and affect the overall…
We introduce and investigate *targeting adversaries* who selectively attack users of Tor or other secure-communication networks. We argue that attacks by such adversaries are more realistic and more significant threats to those most relying…
Despite being the most popular privacy-enhancing network, Tor is increasingly adopted by cybercriminals to obfuscate malicious traffic, hindering the identification of malware-related communications between compromised devices and Command…
We model and analyze passive adversaries that monitors Tor traffic crossing the border of a jurisdiction an adversary is controlling. We show that a single adversary is able to connect incoming and outgoing traffic of their border, tracking…
Lightning Network (LN) is a widely-used network of payment channels enabling faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions. In this paper, we outline three ways an attacker can steal funds from honest LN users. The attacks require dilating the…
In order to prevent the disclosure of privacy-sensitive data, such as names and relations between users, social network graphs have to be anonymised before publication. Naive anonymisation of social network graphs often consists in deleting…
The Ethereum blockchain network is a decentralized platform enabling smart contract execution and transactions of Ether (ETH) [1], its designated cryptocurrency. Ethereum is the second most popular cryptocurrency with a market cap of more…
Popular User-Review Social Networks (URSNs)---such as Dianping, Yelp, and Amazon---are often the targets of reputation attacks in which fake reviews are posted in order to boost or diminish the ratings of listed products and services. These…
In this paper we discuss the threat of malware targeted at extracting information about the relationships in a real-world social network as well as characteristic information about the individuals in the network, which we dub Stealing…
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency attracting a lot of interest both from the general public and researchers. There is an ongoing debate on the question of users' anonymity: while the Bitcoin protocol has been designed to ensure that the activity…
The quality of learning generally improves with the scale and diversity of data. Companies and institutions can therefore benefit from building models over shared data. Many cloud and blockchain platforms, as well as government initiatives,…
We propose in this paper a new propagation vector for malicious software by abusing the Tor network. Tor is particularly relevant, since operating a Tor exit node is easy and involves low costs compared to attack institutional or ISP…
The bitcoin peer-to-peer network has drawn significant attention from researchers, but so far has mostly focused on publicly visible portions of the network, i.e., publicly reachable peers. This mostly ignores the hidden parts of the…
Tor hidden services allow running Internet services while protecting the location of the servers. Their main purpose is to enable freedom of speech even in situations in which powerful adversaries try to suppress it. However, providing…
Anonymity networks are providing practical mechanisms to protect its users against censorship by hiding their identity and information content. The best-known anonymity network, The Onion Routing (Tor) network, is however subject to…