Evaluating User Privacy in Bitcoin
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Author / Producer
Date
2013
Publication Type
Conference Paper
ETH Bibliography
yes
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Abstract
Bitcoin is quickly emerging as a popular digital payment system. However, in spite of its reliance on pseudonyms, Bitcoin raises a number of privacy concerns due to the fact that all of the transactions that take place are publicly announced in the system.
In this paper, we investigate the privacy provisions in Bitcoin when it is used as a primary currency to support the daily transactions of individuals in a university setting. More specifically, we evaluate the privacy that is provided by Bitcoin (i) by analyzing the genuine Bitcoin system and (ii) through a simulator that faithfully mimics the use of Bitcoin within a university. In this setting, our results show that the profiles of almost 40% of the users can be, to a large extent, recovered even when users adopt privacy measures recommended by Bitcoin. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that comprehensively analyzes, and evaluates the privacy implications of Bitcoin.
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Publication status
published
External links
Book title
Financial Cryptography and Data Security
Journal / series
Volume
7859
Pages / Article No.
34 - 51
Publisher
Springer
Event
17th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2013)
Edition / version
Methods
Software
Geographic location
Date collected
Date created
Subject
Bitcoin; User privacy; Privacy definitions; Experimental evaluation
Organisational unit
03755 - Capkun, Srdan / Capkun, Srdan