Perimeter: A network-layer attack on the anonymity of cryptocurrencies
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Author / Producer
Date
2021-10
Publication Type
Conference Paper
ETH Bibliography
yes
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Abstract
Cryptocurrencies are widely used today for anonymous transactions. Such currencies rely on a peer-to-peer network where users can broadcast transactions containing their pseudonyms and ask for approval. Previous research has shown that application-level eavesdroppers, meaning nodes connected to a large portion of the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network, are able to deanonymize multiple users by tracing back the source of transactions. Yet, such attacks are highly visible as the attacker needs to maintain thousands of outbound connections. Moreover, they can be mitigated by purely application-layer countermeasures.
This paper presents a stealthier and harder-to-mitigate attack exploiting the interactions between the networking and application layers. Particularly, the adversary combines her access over Internet infrastructure with application-layer information to deanonymize transactions. We show that this attack, namely PERIMETER, is practical in today’s Internet, achieves high accuracy in Bitcoin, and generalizes to encrypted cryptocurrencies e.g., Ethereum.
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Publication status
published
External links
Book title
Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021
Journal / series
Volume
12674
Pages / Article No.
147 - 166
Publisher
Springer
Event
25th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2021)
Edition / version
Methods
Software
Geographic location
Date collected
Date created
Subject
Deanonymization; Bitcoin; Ethereum; Blockchain; BGP; Routing attack; Network-layer attack
Organisational unit
09477 - Vanbever, Laurent / Vanbever, Laurent
Notes
Conference lecture held on March 1, 2021.
Funding
175525 - Data-Driven Internet Routing (SNF)