Evaluating user privacy in Bitcoin

Elli Androulaki, Ghassan O. Karame, Marc Roeschlin, Tobias Scherer, Srdjan Capkun

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    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.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationFinancial Cryptography and Data Security - 17th International Conference, FC 2013, Revised Selected Papers
    Pages34-51
    Number of pages18
    Volume7859 LNCS
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2013
    Event17th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, FC 2013 - Okinawa, Japan
    Duration: 1 Apr 20135 Apr 2013

    Publication series

    NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
    Volume7859 LNCS
    ISSN (Print)0302-9743
    ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

    Other

    Other17th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, FC 2013
    Country/TerritoryJapan
    CityOkinawa
    Period1/04/135/04/13

    Keywords

    • Bitcoin
    • experimental evaluation
    • privacy definitions
    • user privacy

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