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Research and Challenges on Bitcoin Anonymity

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Data Privacy Management, Autonomous Spontaneous Security, and Security Assurance (DPM 2014, QASA 2014, SETOP 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8872))

Abstract

Bitcoin has emerged as the most successful crypto currency since its appearance back in 2009. Besides its security robustness, two main properties have probably been its key to success: anonymity and decentralization. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive description on the details that make such cryptocurrency an interesting research topic in the privacy community. We perform an exhaustive review of the bitcoin anonymity research papers that have been published so far and we outline some research challenges on that topic.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://web.archive.org/web/20090131115053/http://bitcoin.org/. http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source.

  2. 2.

    Bitcoin uses ECDSA with the curve secp256k1 implying private keys of 256 bit length.

  3. 3.

    Notice that public key, address or bitcoin account are referring to the same concept.

  4. 4.

    Although apparently both amounts should be the same, we will discuss later on in which situation the input value could be greater than the output value.

  5. 5.

    Notice that in Fig. 1, there is two input addresses that are exactly the same which indicates that bitcoins have arrived in this bitcoin account in two separate transactions.

  6. 6.

    A transaction is identified in the bitcoin system by its hash value.

  7. 7.

    Although this is the standard form of bitcoin verification for regular bitcoin transfer transactions, the verification of a transaction can be much more complex and is based on a bitcoin transaction script language, a stack-based execution language (more details can be found in Chap. 5 of [4]).

  8. 8.

    Note that the non-modifiable property of the blockchain imply that bitcoin payments are non reversible.

  9. 9.

    Notice that the value of the target determines the difficulty of the mining process. Bitcoin system adjusts the target value depending on the hash power of the miners in order to set the throughput of new blocks to 1 every 10 min (in mean).

  10. 10.

    The amount of a generation transaction is not constant and it is determined by the bitcoin system. Such value, started in 50 bitcoins, is halved every four years, fixing asymptotically to 21 millions the total number of bitcoins that will be ever created.

  11. 11.

    https://www.torproject.org/.

  12. 12.

    https://geti2p.net/.

  13. 13.

    The main application of the mix concept, proposed by D. Chaum in [13] is the TOR network.

  14. 14.

    At that point, it is important to note that some bitcoin uses, like the one described by CoinJoin, break the assumption that multiple input addresses in a transaction implies the same owner for all those input addresses, assumption that is taken as an heuristic for clustering addresses by almost all the anonymity papers.

  15. 15.

    https://sharedcoin.com/.

  16. 16.

    https://www.darkwallet.is/.

  17. 17.

    http://bitcoinfog.com/.

  18. 18.

    http://app.bitlaundry.com/.

  19. 19.

    https://sharedcoin.com/.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia (MCYT) funds under grants TIN2010-15764 “N-KHRONOUS” and TIN2011-27076-C03 “CO-PRIVACY”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. d’Enginyeria de la Informació i les Comunicacions, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193, Bellaterra, Catalonia, Spain

    Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí

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  1. Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí
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Correspondence to Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Télécom SudParis, Evry, France

    Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro

  2. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain

    Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí

  3. Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

    Emil Lupu

  4. Universität Passau, Passau, Germany

    Joachim Posegga

  5. University of Urbino, Urbino, Italy

    Alessandro Aldini

  6. Pisa Research Area, National Research Council - CNR, Pisa, Italy

    Fabio Martinelli

  7. Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Neeraj Suri

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Herrera-Joancomartí, J. (2015). Research and Challenges on Bitcoin Anonymity. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., et al. Data Privacy Management, Autonomous Spontaneous Security, and Security Assurance. DPM QASA SETOP 2014 2014 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8872. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17016-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17016-9_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-17015-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-17016-9

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