Related papers: Deanonymizing Tor hidden service users through Bit…
There was a time when the word security was only confined to the physical protection of things that were valuable which must be guarded against all the odds. Today, in a world where people can do things virtually have emerged the necessity…
Cryptocurrencies based on decentralized systems, especially blockchain, are gaining popularity more than ever. Freedom advocates hail blockchain technology as a breakthrough in digital privacy and internet anonymity. Unfortunately, after…
Lightning Network (LN) is designed to amend the scalability and privacy issues of Bitcoin. It's a payment channel network where Bitcoin transactions are issued off chain, onion routed through a private payment path with the aim to settle…
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…
Tor is a widely used anonymity network that conceals user identities by routing traffic through encrypted relays, yet it remains vulnerable to traffic correlation attacks that deanonymize users by matching patterns in ingress and egress…
Tor Onion Services are a way to host websites and other internet services anonymously. Onion Services are often used to bypass internet censorship and provide information services to users in oppressive regimes. This paper presents an…
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…
Private blockchain networks are used by enterprises to manage decentralized processes without trusted mediators and without exposing their assets publicly on an open network like Ethereum. Yet external parties that cannot join such networks…
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…
Recent studies have shown that Tor onion (hidden) service websites are particularly vulnerable to website fingerprinting attacks due to their limited number and sensitive nature. In this work we present a multi-level feature analysis of…
Unlike suggested during their early years of existence, Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies in fact offer significantly less privacy as compared to traditional banking. A myriad of privacy-enhancing extensions to those cryptocurrencies as…
One of the most important issues in peer-to-peer networks is anonymity. The major anonymity for peer-to-peer users concerned with the users' identities and actions which can be revealed by any other members. There are many approaches…
Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency used worldwide. It provides pseudonymity to its users by establishing identity using public keys as transaction end-points. These transactions are recorded on an immutable public ledger called…
Anonymous communication systems are subject to selective denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Selective DoS attacks lower anonymity as they force paths to be rebuilt multiple times to ensure delivery which increases the opportunity for more…
Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency that relies on cryptography rather than trusted third parties such as central banks for its security. Underpinning the operation of the currency is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network that facilitates…
This research delves into the intricacies of Bitcoin, a decentralized peer-to-peer network, and its associated blockchain, which records all transactions since its inception. While this ensures integrity and transparency, the transparent…
The advent of Web 3.0, underpinned by blockchain technologies, promises to transform the internet's landscape by empowering individuals with decentralized control over their data. However, this evolution brings unique security challenges…
In many blockchains, e.g., Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), the primary representation used for wallet addresses is a hardly memorable 40-digit hexadecimal string. As a result, users often select addresses from their recent transaction…
Bitcoin is built on a blockchain, an immutable decentralised ledger that allows entities (users) to exchange Bitcoins in a pseudonymous manner. Bitcoins are associated with alpha-numeric addresses and are transferred via transactions. Each…
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…