Related papers: Cross-Layer Deanonymization Methods in the Lightni…
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…
The Bitcoin system is an anonymous, decentralized crypto-currency. There are some deanonymizating techniques to cluster Bitcoin addresses and to map them to users' identifications in the two research directions of Analysis of Transaction…
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…
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…
We analyzed the associations between Bitcoin transactions and addresses to cluster address and further find groups of addresses controlled by the same entity. It revealed the vulnerabilities of Bitcoin anonymity mechanism, which could be…
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…
Bitcoin's Lightning Network (LN) is a scalability solution for Bitcoin allowing transactions to be issued with negligible fees and settled instantly at scale. In order to use LN, funds need to be locked in payment channels on the Bitcoin…
The development of clustering heuristics has demonstrated that Bitcoin is not completely anonymous. Currently, existing clustering heuristics only consider confirmed transactions recorded in the Bitcoin blockchain. However, unconfirmed…
The Lightning Network (LN) is a prominent payment channel network aimed at addressing Bitcoin's scalability issues. Due to the privacy of channel balances, senders cannot reliably choose sufficiently liquid payment paths and resort to a…
As Lightning network payments are neither broadcasted nor publicly stored. Thus LN has been seen not only as scalability but also as privacy solution for Bitcoin. The protocol guarantees that only the latest channel state can be confirmed…
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…
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 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…
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…
The Lightning Network (LN) is a second-layer protocol for Bitcoin designed to enable fast and cost-efficient off-chain transactions. Channels in the LN can be closed either by mutual agreement or unilaterally through a forced closure, which…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network is a layer 2 protocol designed to facilitate fast and inexpensive Bitcoin transactions. It operates by establishing channels between users, where Bitcoin is locked and transactions are conducted off-chain until…
Privacy-seeking cryptocurrency users rely on anonymization techniques like CoinJoin and ring transactions. By using such technologies benign users potentially provide anonymity to bad actors. We propose overlay protocols to resolve the…
Payment channel networks, and the Lightning Network in particular, seem to offer a solution to the lack of scalability and privacy offered by Bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Previous research has focused on the…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network (BLN), a so-called "second layer" payment protocol, was launched in 2018 to scale up the number of transactions between Bitcoin owners. In this paper, we analyse the structure of the BLN over a period of 18…
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…