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Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have surged in popularity over the last decade. Although Bitcoin does not claim to provide anonymity for its users, it enjoys a public perception of being a `privacy-preserving' financial system. In…
Cryptocurrency systems can be subject to deanonimization attacks by exploiting the network-level communication on their peer-to-peer network. Adversaries who control a set of colluding node(s) within the peer-to-peer network can observe…
As adoption of blockchain-based systems grows, more attention is being given to privacy of these systems. Early systems like BitCoin provided few privacy features. As a result, systems with strong privacy guarantees, including Monero,…
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…
Privacy protection mechanisms are a fundamental aspect of security in cryptocurrency systems, particularly in decentralized networks such as Bitcoin. Although Bitcoin addresses are not directly associated with real-world identities, this…
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…
Bitcoin is a popular alternative to fiat money, widely used for its perceived anonymity properties. However, recent attacks on Bitcoin's peer-to-peer (P2P) network demonstrated that its gossip-based flooding protocols, which are used to…
Over the past decade, the Bitcoin P2P network protocol has become a reference model for all modern cryptocurrencies. While nodes in this network are known, the connections among them are kept hidden, as it is commonly believed that this…
Bitcoin is a decentralized, pseudonymous cryptocurrency that is one of the most used digital assets to date. Its unregulated nature and inherent anonymity of users have led to a dramatic increase in its use for illicit activities. This…
With the rapid increase of threats on the Internet, people are continuously seeking privacy and anonymity. Services such as Bitcoin and Tor were introduced to provide anonymity for online transactions and Web browsing. Due to its…
Bitcoin (BTC) is probably the most transparent payment network in the world, thanks to the full history of transactions available to the public. Though, Bitcoin is not a fully anonymous environment, rather a pseudonymous one, accounting for…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantee to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker's computational power does not exceed %50 of the network power. In this paper, we…
Bitcoin (BTC) pseudonyms (layer 1) can effectively be deanonymized using heuristic clustering techniques. However, while performing transactions off-chain (layer 2) in the Lightning Network (LN) seems to enhance privacy, a systematic…
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…
We consider the privacy of interactions between individuals in a network. For many networks, while nodes are anonymous to outside observers, the existence of a link between individuals implies the possibility of one node revealing…
Bitcoin is a top-ranked cryptocurrency that has experienced huge growth and survived numerous attacks. The protocols making up Bitcoin must therefore accommodate the growth of the network and ensure security. Security of the Bitcoin network…
Providing reliable and surreptitious communications is difficult in the presence of adaptive and resourceful state level censors. In this paper we introduce Tithonus, a framework that builds on the Bitcoin blockchain and network to provide…
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 Bitcoin P2P network currently represents a reference benchmark for modern cryptocurrencies. Its underlying protocol defines how transactions and blocks are distributed through all participating nodes. To protect user privacy, the…
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…