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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…
Cryptocurrency users increasingly rely on obfuscation techniques such as mixers, swappers, and decentralised or no-KYC exchanges to protect their anonymity. However, at the same time, these services are exploited by criminals to conceal and…
One reason for the popularity of Bitcoin is due to its anonymity. Although several heuristics have been used to break the anonymity, new approaches are proposed to enhance its anonymity at the same time. One of them is the mixing service.…
Mixer services purportedly remove all connections between the input (deposited) Bitcoins and the output (withdrawn) mixed Bitcoins, seemingly rendering taint analysis tracking ineffectual. In this paper, we introduce and explore a novel…
Analyzing cryptocurrency payment flows has become a key forensic method in law enforcement and is nowadays used to investigate a wide spectrum of criminal activities. However, despite its widespread adoption, the evidential value of…
A coinjoin protocol aims to increase transactional privacy for Bitcoin and Bitcoin-like blockchains via collaborative transactions, by violating assumptions behind common analysis heuristics. Estimating the resulting privacy gain is a…
Cloud computing has been regarded as the technology enabler for the Internet of Things (IoT). To ensure the most effective collection of IoT-based evidence, it is vital for forensic practitioners to possess a contemporary understanding of…
Since the creation of Bitcoin, transaction tracking is one of the prominent means for following the movement of Bitcoins involved in illegal activities. Although every Bitcoin transaction is recorded in the blockchain database, which is…
This manuscript presents an exhaustive review of blockchain-based mixing services, aiming to fill the existing gap between academic innovations and real-world implementations. Starting with an identification of the core functionalities and…
As the first decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency system allowing people to trade with pseudonymous addresses, Bitcoin has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, the P2P and pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin make…
Many third-party cloud providers set up quantum hardware as a service that includes a wide range of qubit technologies and architectures to maximize performance at minimal cost. However, there is little visibility to where the execution of…
Blockchain technologies have overturned the digital finance industry by introducing a decentralized pseudonymous means of monetary transfer. The pseudonymous nature introduced privacy concerns, enabling various deanonymization techniques,…
Cryptocurrency has been (ab)used to purchase illicit goods and services such as drugs, weapons and child pornography (also referred to as child sexual abuse materials), and thus mobile devices (where cryptocurrency wallet applications are…
The dramatic adoption of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the USA has revolutionized the financial landscape and provided unprecedented investment and transaction efficiency opportunities. The prime objective of this research project…
WebAssembly has gained significant traction as a high-performance, secure, and portable compilation target for the Web and beyond. However, its growing adoption has also introduced new security challenges. One such threat is cryptojacking,…
The financial crime landscape is evolving along with the digitization in financial services. In this context, laws and regulations cannot efficiently cope with a fast-moving industry such as finance, which translates in late adoption of…
Monero is a privacy-centric cryptocurrency that allows users to obscure their transactions by including chaff coins, called "mixins," along with the actual coins they spend. In this paper, we empirically evaluate two weaknesses in Monero's…
Fraud across the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem is growing, with victims losing billions to DeFi scams every year. However, there is a disconnect between the reported value of these scams and associated legal prosecutions. We use…
Monero is a popular crypto-currency which focuses on privacy. The blockchain uses cryptographic techniques to obscure transaction values as well as a `ring confidential transaction' which seeks to hide a real transaction among a variable…
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…