TY - GEN
T1 - Evaluating user privacy in Bitcoin
AU - Androulaki, Elli
AU - Karame, Ghassan O.
AU - Roeschlin, Marc
AU - Scherer, Tobias
AU - Capkun, Srdjan
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Bitcoin
KW - experimental evaluation
KW - privacy definitions
KW - user privacy
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84883310811&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-39884-1_4
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-39884-1_4
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84883310811
SN - 9783642398834
VL - 7859 LNCS
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 34
EP - 51
BT - Financial Cryptography and Data Security - 17th International Conference, FC 2013, Revised Selected Papers
T2 - 17th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, FC 2013
Y2 - 1 April 2013 through 5 April 2013
ER -