Botcoin: Monetizing Stolen Cycles

Huang, Danny Yuxing; Dharmdasani, Hitesh; Meiklejohn, Sarah; Dave, Vacha; Grier, Chris; McCoy, Damon; Savage, Stefan; Weaver, Nicholas; Snoeren, Alex C.; Levchenko, Kirill

doi:10.14722/ndss.2014.23044

Cited by 57 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The popular black market website Silk Road [30] operated from Feb. 2011 until Oct. 2013 when it was seized and shut down by the FBI. Botnets have found Bitcoin mining to be a supplemental source of income [57]. A current US federal court case involves a large Bitcoinbased Ponzi scheme [109].…”

Section: A a Contextualized Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies

Bonneau

Miller

Clark³

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

863

580

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Bitcoin has emerged as the most successful cryptographic currency in history. Within two years of its quiet launch in 2009, Bitcoin grew to comprise billions of dollars of economic value despite only cursory analysis of the system's design. Since then a growing literature has identified hidden-but-important properties of the system, discovered attacks, proposed promising alternatives, and singled out difficult future challenges. Meanwhile a large and vibrant open-source community has proposed and deployed numerous modifications and extensions.We provide the first systematic exposition Bitcoin and the many related cryptocurrencies or 'altcoins.' Drawing from a scattered body of knowledge, we identify three key components of Bitcoin's design that can be decoupled. This enables a more insightful analysis of Bitcoin's properties and future stability. We map the design space for numerous proposed modifications, providing comparative analyses for alternative consensus mechanisms, currency allocation mechanisms, computational puzzles, and key management tools. We survey anonymity issues in Bitcoin and provide an evaluation framework for analyzing a variety of privacy-enhancing proposals. Finally we provide new insights on what we term disintermediation protocols, which absolve the need for trusted intermediaries in an interesting set of applications. We identify three general disintermediation strategies and provide a detailed comparison. I. WHY BITCOIN IS WORTHY OF RESEARCHConsider two opposing viewpoints on Bitcoin in strawman form. The first is that "Bitcoin works in practice, but not in theory." At times devoted members of the Bitcoin community espouse this philosophy and criticize the security research community for failing to discover Bitcoin, not immediately recognizing its novelty, and still today dismissing it due to the lack of a rigorous theoretical foundation.A second viewpoint is that Bitcoin's stability relies on an unknown combination of socioeconomic factors which is hopelessly intractable to model with sufficient precision, failing to yield a convincing argument for the system's soundness. Given these difficulties, experienced security researchers may avoid Bitcoin as a topic of study, considering it prudent security engineering to only design systems with precise threat models that admit formal security proofs.We intend to show where each of these simplistic viewpoints fail. To the first, we contend that while Bitcoin has worked surprisingly well in practice so far, there is an important role for research to play in identifying precisely why this has been possible, moving beyond a blind acceptance of the informal arguments presented with the system's initial proposal. Furthermore, it is crucial to understand whether Bitcoin will still "work in practice" as practices change. We expect external political and economic factors to evolve, the system must change if and when transaction volume scales, and the nature of the monetary rewards for Bitcoin miners will change over time as part of the system design....

show abstract

Section: A a Contextualized Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies

Bonneau

Miller

Clark³

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

863

580

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…al consider Bitcoin mining malware and quantify the amount of bitcoin that Bitcoin mining botnets have minted using the block chain [8]. Our paper does not consider malware, but our block chain analysis techniques are similar to those of Huang et.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

There’s No Free Lunch, Even Using Bitcoin: Tracking the Popularity and Profits of Virtual Currency Scams

Vasek

Moore

2015

Financial Cryptography and Data Security

172

116

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. We present the first empirical analysis of Bitcoin-based scams: operations established with fraudulent intent. By amalgamating reports gathered by voluntary vigilantes and tracked in online forums, we identify 192 scams and categorize them into four groups: Ponzi schemes, mining scams, scam wallets and fraudulent exchanges. In 21% of the cases, we also found the associated Bitcoin addresses, which enables us to track payments into and out of the scams. We find that at least $11 million has been contributed to the scams from 13 000 distinct victims. Furthermore, we present evidence that the most successful scams depend on large contributions from a very small number of victims. Finally, we discuss ways in which the scams could be countered.

show abstract

“…These malware either mine independently or participate in public or dark mining pools, connecting either directly or through proxies [26]. Customized malware builds have also been found for smartphones, webcams, and even network storage devices.…”

Section: Theft and Malwarementioning

confidence: 99%

Bitcoin: Perils of an Unregulated Global P2P Currency

Ali

Clarke

McCorry

2015

Security Protocols XXIII

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Bitcoin has, since 2009, become an increasingly popular online currency, in large part because it resists regulation and provides anonymity. We discuss how Bitcoin has become both a highly useful tool for criminals and a lucrative target for crime, and argue that this arises from the same essential ideological and design choices that have driven Bitcoin's success to date. In this paper, we survey the landscape of Bitcoinrelated crime, such as dark markets and bitcoin theft, and speculate about possible future possibilities, including tax evasion and money laundering. AbstractBitcoin has, since 2009, become an increasingly popular online currency, in large part because it resists regulation and provides anonymity. We discuss how Bitcoin has become both a highly useful tool for criminals and a lucrative target for crime, and argue that this arises from the same essential ideological and design choices that have driven Bitcoin's success to date. In this paper, we survey the landscape of Bitcoin-related crime, such as dark markets and bitcoin theft, and speculate about possible future possibilities, including tax evasion and money laundering. Abstract. Bitcoin has, since 2009, become an increasingly popular online currency, in large part because it resists regulation and provides anonymity. We discuss how Bitcoin has become both a highly useful tool for criminals and a lucrative target for crime, and argue that this arises from the same essential ideological and design choices that have driven Bitcoin's success to date. In this paper, we survey the landscape of Bitcoin-related crime, such as dark markets and bitcoin theft, and speculate about possible future possibilities, including tax evasion and money laundering. About the authors

show abstract

Botcoin: Monetizing Stolen Cycles

Cited by 57 publications

References 11 publications

SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies

SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies

There’s No Free Lunch, Even Using Bitcoin: Tracking the Popularity and Profits of Virtual Currency Scams

Bitcoin: Perils of an Unregulated Global P2P Currency

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About