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Resource type: Journal Article DOI: 10.1145/3084459 BibTeX citation key: BojjaVenkatakrishnan2017 View all bibliographic details |
Categories: Not Monero-focused Keywords: Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies Creators: Bojja Venkatakrishnan, Fanti, Viswanath Collection: Proc. ACM Meas. Anal. Comput. Syst. |
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Attachments 3084459.pdf [39/186] | URLs https://doi.org/10.1145/3084459 |
Abstract |
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 reality, cryptocurrencies publish users' entire transaction histories in plaintext, albeit under a pseudonym; this is required for transaction validation. Therefore, if a user's pseudonym can be linked to their human identity, the privacy fallout can be significant. Recently, researchers have demonstrated deanonymization attacks that exploit weaknesses in the Bitcoin network's peer-to-peer (P2P) networking protocols. In particular, the P2P network currently forwards content in a structured way that allows observers to deanonymize users. In this work, we redesign the P2P network from first principles with the goal of providing strong, provable anonymity guarantees. We propose a simple networking policy called Dandelion which provides quasi-optimal, network-wide anonymity, with minimal cost to the network's utility. We also discuss practical implementation challenges and propose heuristic solutions.
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