Related papers: Mixing detection on Bitcoin transactions using sta…
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…
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…
Determining the trust of an individual Bitcoin wallet is a difficult problem. There are no ratings, that offer vendors or exchanges meaningful information about the level of the taint of Bitcoins they are receiving. Lack of such information…
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…
Money laundering is a global phenomenon with wide-reaching social and economic consequences. Cryptocurrencies are particularly susceptible due to the lack of control by authorities and their anonymity. Thus, it is important to develop new…
To strengthen the anonymity of Bitcoin, several centralized coin-mixing providers (mixers) such as BitcoinFog.com, BitLaundry.com, and Blockchain.info assist users to mix Bitcoins through CoinJoin transactions with multiple inputs and…
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…
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…
We show how third-party web trackers can deanonymize users of cryptocurrencies. We present two distinct but complementary attacks. On most shopping websites, third party trackers receive information about user purchases for purposes of…
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…
Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will attempt to construct the one-to-many…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The problem of anomaly detection has been studied for a long time. In short, anomalies are abnormal or unlikely things. In financial networks, thieves and illegal activities are often anomalous in nature. Members of a network want to detect…
This thesis presents techniques to investigate transactions in uncharted cryptocurrencies and services. Cryptocurrencies are used to securely send payments online. Payments via the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, use pseudonymous addresses…
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 bitcoin peer-to-peer network has drawn significant attention from researchers, but so far has mostly focused on publicly visible portions of the network, i.e., publicly reachable peers. This mostly ignores the hidden parts of the…