Studying Bitcoin privacy attacks and their Impact on Bitcoin-based Identity Methods

Simin Ghesmati; Walid Fdhila; Edgar Weippl

Paper 2021/1088

Studying Bitcoin privacy attacks and their Impact on Bitcoin-based Identity Methods

Simin Ghesmati, Walid Fdhila, and Edgar Weippl

Abstract

The Bitcoin blockchain was the first publicly verifiable, and distributed ledger, where it is possible for everyone to download and check the full history of all data records from the genesis block. These properties lead to the emergence of new types of applications and the redesign of traditional systems that no longer respond to current business needs (e.g., transparency, protection against censorship, decentralization). One particular application is the use of blockchain technology to enable decentralized and self-sovereign identities including new mechanisms for creating, resolving, and revoking them. The public availability of data records has, in turn, paved the way for new kinds of attacks that combine sophisticated heuristics with auxiliary information to compromise users' privacy and deanonymize their identities. In this paper, we review and categorize Bitcoin privacy attacks, investigate their impact on one of the Bitcoin-based identity methods namely did:btcr, and analyze and discuss its privacy properties.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Minor revision. Springer
Keywords: If the paper is published with IACR Unless the paper was published nowhere else publication information must be given.
Contact author(s): ghesmti @ icloud com
History: 2021-08-25: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2021/1088
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/1088,
      author = {Simin Ghesmati and Walid Fdhila and Edgar Weippl},
      title = {Studying Bitcoin privacy attacks and their Impact on Bitcoin-based Identity Methods},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2021/1088},
      year = {2021},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1088}
}