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Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have made payment transactions possible without a trusted third party, but they have a scalability issue due to their consensus mechanisms. Payment networks have emerged to overcome this…
Most public blockchain protocols, including the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, do not formally specify the order in which miners should select transactions from the pool of pending (or uncommitted) transactions for inclusion in…
Q&A websites rely on user-generated responses, with incentives such as reputation scores or monetary rewards often offered. While some users may find it intrinsically rewarding to assist others, studies indicate that payment can improve the…
The Lightning Network is the most widely used payment channel network (PCN) to date, making it an attractive attack surface for adversaries. In this paper, we analyze the Lightning Network's PCN topology and investigate its resilience…
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…
Cryptocurrency networks such as Bitcoin have emerged as a distributed alternative to traditional centralized financial transaction networks. However, there are major challenges in scaling up the throughput of such networks. Lightning…
Bitcoins have recently become an increasingly popular cryptocurrency through which users trade electronically and more anonymously than via traditional electronic transfers. Bitcoin's design keeps all transactions in a public ledger. The…
Anti-money laundering (AML) regulations play a critical role in safeguarding financial systems, but bear high costs for institutions and drive financial exclusion for those on the socioeconomic and international margins. The advent of…
One of the fundamental applications for a practically useful system of money is remuneration. Information pertaining to the amount of compensation awarded to different individuals is often considered sensitive, commanding a certain degree…
While various covert botnets were proposed in the past, they still lack complete anonymization for their servers/botmasters or suffer from slow communication between the botmaster and the bots. In this paper, we first propose a new…
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 cryptocurrency system enables users to transact securely and pseudo-anonymously by using an arbitrary number of aliases (Bitcoin addresses). Cybercriminals exploit these characteristics to commit immutable and presumably untraceable…
Cryptocurrencies are distributed systems that allow exchanges of native (and non-) tokens among participants. The complete historical bookkeeping and its wide availability opens up an unprecedented possibility, i.e. that of understanding…
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…
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…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network (BLN) was launched in 2018 to scale up the number of transactions between Bitcoin owners. Although several contributions concerning the analysis of the BLN binary structure have recently appeared in the…
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…
Network-level privacy is the Achilles heel of financial privacy in cryptocurrencies. Financial privacy amounts to achieving and maintaining blockchain- and network-level privacy. Blockchain-level privacy recently received substantial…
This paper presents a new blockchain network simulator that uses bitcoin's original reference implementation as its main application. The proposed simulator leverages the use of lightweight virtualization technology to build a fine tuned…
In light of micro-scale inefficiencies induced by the high degree of fragmentation of the Bitcoin trading landscape, we utilize a granular data set comprised of orderbook and trades data from the most liquid Bitcoin markets, in order to…