Related papers: Cross-Layer Deanonymization Methods in the Lightni…
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 propose a new generation…
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…
Anonymity is one of the most important qualities of blockchain technology. For example, one can simply create a bitcoin address to send and receive funds without providing KYC to any authority. In general, the real identity behind…
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 has created a new exchange paradigm within which financial transactions can be trusted without an intermediary. This premise of a free decentralized transactional network however requires, in its current implementation, unrestricted…
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…
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…
Recent work has demonstrated significant anonymity vulnerabilities in Bitcoin's networking stack. In particular, the current mechanism for broadcasting Bitcoin transactions allows third-party observers to link transactions to the IP…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
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,…
Blockchain analysis is essential for understanding how cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are used in practice, and address clustering is a cornerstone of blockchain analysis. However, current techniques rely on heuristics that have not been…
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…
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…
Remote Procedure Call (RPC) services have become a primary gateway for users to access public blockchains. While they offer significant convenience, RPC services also introduce critical privacy challenges that remain insufficiently…
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…
It is now a whole year since Lightning Network (LN) has been launched on the Bitcoi's mainnet. LN has been claimed as the solution for several of Bitcoin's weaknesses such as its difficulty to scale in number of transactions per second and…
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…
In this work we use formal verification to prove that the Lightning Network (LN), the most prominent scaling technique for Bitcoin, always safeguards the funds of honest users. We provide a custom implementation of (a simplification of) LN,…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network, launched in 2018, serves as a layer 2 scaling solution for Bitcoin. The Lightning Network allows users to establish channels between each other and subsequently exchange off-chain payments. Together, these…
Federated Learning allows collaborative training without data sharing in settings where participants do not trust the central server and one another. Privacy can be further improved by ensuring that communication between the participants…