Related papers: TxProbe: Discovering Bitcoin's Network Topology Us…
Proliferation of cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin) that allow pseudo-anonymous transactions, has made it easier for ransomware developers to demand ransom by encrypting sensitive user data. The recently revealed strikes of ransomware attacks…
Credit networks rely on decentralized, pairwise trust relationships (channels) to exchange money or goods. Credit networks arise naturally in many financial systems, including the recent construct of payment channel networks in blockchain…
Blockchain technologies underpin an expanding ecosystem of decentralized applications, financial systems, and infrastructure. However, the fundamental networking layer that sustains these systems, the peer-to-peer layer, of all but the top…
Bitcoin is a decentralized P2P digital currency in which coins are generated by a distributed set of miners and transaction are broadcasted via a peer-to-peer network. While Bitcoin provides some level of anonymity (or rather pseudonymity)…
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that features a distributed, decentralized and trustworthy mechanism, which has made Bitcoin a popular global transaction platform. The transaction efficiency among nations and the privacy benefiting from address…
The Monero blockchain enables anonymous transactions through advanced cryptography in its peer-to-peer network, which underpins decentralization, security, and trustless interactions. However, privacy measures obscure peer connections,…
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…
Off-chain transaction channels represent one of the leading techniques to scale the transaction throughput in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. They allow multiple agents to route payments through one another. So far, the topology and…
This paper proposes a method of emulation of \verb|OP_RAND| opcode on Bitcoin through a trustless interactive game between transaction counterparties. The game result is probabilistic and doesn't allow any party to cheat, increasing their…
Bitcoin transactions include unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) as their inputs and generate one or more newly owned UTXOs at specified addresses. Each UTXO can only be used as an input in a transaction once, and using it in two or more…
In Ethereum, the ledger exchanges messages along an underlying Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network to reach consistency. Understanding the underlying network topology of Ethereum is crucial for network optimization, security and scalability.…
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,…
Cryptocurrencies gained lots of attention mainly because of the anonymous way of online payment, which they suggested. Meanwhile, Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies have experienced severe deanonymization attacks. To address these…
The world economy is experiencing the novel adoption of distributed currencies that are free from the control of central banks. Distributed currencies suffer from extreme volatility, and this can lead to catastrophic implications during…
Cybercriminals often leverage Bitcoin for their illicit activities. In this work, we propose back-and-forth exploration, a novel automated Bitcoin transaction tracing technique to identify cybercrime financial relationships. Given seed…
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 derives a verifiable temporal order from probabilistic block discovery and cumulative proof-of-work rather than from a trusted global clock. We show that block arrivals exhibit stable exponential behavior across difficulty epochs,…
The Bitcoin protocol allows to save arbitrary data on the blockchain through a special instruction of the scripting language, called OP_RETURN. A growing number of protocols exploit this feature to extend the range of applications of the…
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…
In the past few years, the network measurement community has been interested in the problem of internet topology discovery using a large number (hundreds or thousands) of measurement monitors. The standard way to obtain information about…