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A Simple Yet Efficient Approach to Combat Transaction Malleability in Bitcoin

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Information Security Applications (WISA 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8909))

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Abstract

Bitcoin has emerged as a popular crypto currency. It was introduced in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto (A pseudonym). The reasons for its popularity include its decentralized nature, double spending prevention, smart strategy to counter inflation and providing a certain degree of anonymity. In February 2014, Bitcoin community was shocked to know that a Japan based company named Mt. Gox who, were dealing 70 percent of Bitcoin transactions that time, announced that they were hit by a bug in the Bitcoin protocol named as Transaction Malleability. The company lost hundreds of millions of dollars worth bitcoin. Soon after this, another company SilkRoad 2 also claimed to have affected by same issue. To date there is little research literature available on this recent issue and it is hard to grasp this problem. The purpose of writing this paper is twofold. We discuss Transaction Malleability in detail with respect to the structure of Bitcoin transactions in order to make reader properly understands what Transaction Malleability is and how it works. We also propose a mechanism to counter this issue.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Many theories have been presented but none has been proved to be correct.

  2. 2.

    CoinDesk is a famous Bitcoin trading website (www.coindesk.com).

  3. 3.

    In fact it is not simply the hash, but the results of a series of steps performed on public ECDSA key to get the private key. For a demonstration please visit www.gobittest.appspot.com/Address.

References

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  4. Mt. Gox files for bankruptcy, hit with lawsuit. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/28/us-bitcoin-mtgox-bankruptcy-idUSBREA1R0FX20140228

  5. Mt. Gox files for bankruptcy, hit with lawsuit. http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-0-hacked-using-bitcoin-bug-all-its-funds-stolen/

  6. Blockchain.info: Bitcoin Block Explorer. https://blockchain.info/

  7. Transactions. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transactions

  8. TMt. Gox. Mtgox press release announcing the stop of withdrawls (2014). http://www.mtgox.com/press_release_20140210.html

  9. Transaction Malleability. http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_Malleability

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea

    Ubaidullah Rajput, Fizza Abbas, Rasheed Hussain, Hasoo Eun & Heekuck Oh

Authors
  1. Ubaidullah Rajput
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  2. Fizza Abbas
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  3. Rasheed Hussain
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  4. Hasoo Eun
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  5. Heekuck Oh
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Heekuck Oh .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Pukyong National University, Busan, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)

    Kyung-Hyune Rhee

  2. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Soongsil University, Seoul, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)

    Jeong Hyun Yi

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Rajput, U., Abbas, F., Hussain, R., Eun, H., Oh, H. (2015). A Simple Yet Efficient Approach to Combat Transaction Malleability in Bitcoin. In: Rhee, KH., Yi, J. (eds) Information Security Applications. WISA 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8909. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15087-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15087-1_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15086-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15087-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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