On the privacy provisions of Bloom filters in lightweight bitcoin clients

Gervais, Arthur; Čapkun, Srđjan; Karame, Ghassan; Gruber, Damian

doi:10.1145/2664243.2664267

Cited by 104 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…ree different approaches have been taken to perform address clustering: using network layer data [26], performing analysis over the transaction graph [27][28][29], and analyzing Bloom filters [30].…”

Section: User Profilingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cryptocurrency Networks: A New P2P Paradigm

Delgado-Segura

Pérez-Solà

Herrera-Joancomartí

et al. 2018

Mobile Information Systems

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P2P networks are the mechanism used by cryptocurrencies to disseminate system information while keeping the whole system as much decentralized as possible. Cryptocurrency P2P networks have new characteristics that propose new challenges and avoid some problems of existing P2P networks. By characterizing the most relevant cryptocurrency network, Bitcoin, we provide details on different properties of cryptocurrency networks and their similarities and differences with standard P2P network paradigms. Our study allows us to conclude that cryptocurrency networks present a new paradigm of P2P networks due to the mechanisms they use to achieve high resilience and security. With this new paradigm, interesting research lines can be further developed, both in the focused field of P2P cryptocurrency networks and also when such networks are combined with other distributed scenarios.

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Section: User Profilingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cryptocurrency Networks: A New P2P Paradigm

Delgado-Segura

Pérez-Solà

Herrera-Joancomartí

et al. 2018

Mobile Information Systems

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“…SPV verification requires processing an ever-growing chain of proof-of-work solutions, although optimizations are possible such as starting from hard-coded checkpoints. SPV also carries privacy concerns as it requires disclosing the set of addresses the client is interested in to third parties (see Section VII and [49]). …”

Section: A Simplified Payment Verification (Spv) Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It remains to be seen if Bitcoin's P2P layer will evolve to better utilize Tor or if a dedicated anonymity network will be developed. Finally, current SPV implementations provide little anonymity due to the difficulty of privately retrieving the list of transactions that the client is interested in [49].…”

Section: A Deanonymizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies

Bonneau

Miller

Clark³

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

901

580

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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....

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“…These full nodes offer the user increased privacy and security that lightweight clients do not offer (Gervais et al 2014). …”

Section: Solution To the Double Spending Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

From chaining blocks to breaking even: A study on the profitability of bitcoin mining from 2012 to 2016

2018

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Bitcoin is a widely-spread payment instrument, but it is doubtful whether the proof-of-work (PoW) nature of the system is financially sustainable on the long term. To assess sustainability, we focus on the bitcoin miners as they play an important role in the proof-of-work consensus mechanism of bitcoin to create trust in the currency. Miners offer their services against a reward while recurring expenses. Our results show that bitcoin mining has become less profitable over time to the extent that profits seem to converge to zero. This is what economic theory predicts for a competitive market that has a single homogenous good. We analyze the actors involved in the bitcoin system as well as the value flows between these actors using the e 3 value methodology. The value flows are quantified using publicly available data about the bitcoin network. However, two important value flows for the miners, namely hardware investments and expenses for electricity power, are not available from public sources. Therefore, we contribute an approach to estimate the installed base of bitcoin hardware equipment over time. Using this estimate, we can calculate the expenses miner should have. At the end of our analysis period, the marginal profit of mining a bitcoin becomes negative, i.e., to a loss for the miners. This loss is caused by the consensus mechanism of the bitcoin protocol, which requires a substantial investment in hardware and significant recurring daily expenses for energy. Therefore, a sustainable crypto currency needs higher payments for miners or more energy efficient algorithms to achieve consensus in a network about the truth of the distributed ledger.

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On the privacy provisions of Bloom filters in lightweight bitcoin clients

Cited by 104 publications

References 19 publications

Cryptocurrency Networks: A New P2P Paradigm

Cryptocurrency Networks: A New P2P Paradigm

SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies

From chaining blocks to breaking even: A study on the profitability of bitcoin mining from 2012 to 2016

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