Abstract
Over the last 4 years, Bitcoin, a decentralized P2P crypto-currency, has gained widespread attention. The ability to create pseudo-anonymous financial transactions using bitcoins has made the currency attractive to users who value their privacy. Although previous work has analyzed the degree of anonymity Bitcoin offers using clustering and flow analysis, none have demonstrated the ability to map Bitcoin addresses directly to IP data. We propose a novel approach to creating and evaluating such mappings solely using real-time transaction traffic collected over 5 months. We developed heuristics for identifying ownership relationships between Bitcoin addresses and IP addresses. We discuss the circumstances under which these relationships become apparent and demonstrate how nearly 1,000 Bitcoin addresses can be mapped to their likely owner IPs by leveraging anomalous relaying behavior.
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- 1.
Omitting certain details, a Bitcoin address is simply a public key to which a number of transformations and hashes have been applied. Thus, the terms Bitcoin address and public key can be used interchangeably.
- 2.
We note that this does not mean the creator owns the funds associated with that Bitcoin address (see discussion on eWallets in Sect. 7).
- 3.
We discuss why this assumption is flawed in Sect. 7.
- 4.
We avoided inbound connections to prevent connecting to Tor/I2P nodes. A listening Bitcoin peer cannot be hidden by Tor or I2P since these technologies only protect the anonymity of people making outbound connections.
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Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Grants No. CNS-1228700 and CNS-0905447. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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© 2014 International Financial Cryptography Association
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Koshy, P., Koshy, D., McDaniel, P. (2014). An Analysis of Anonymity in Bitcoin Using P2P Network Traffic. In: Christin, N., Safavi-Naini, R. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8437. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45472-5_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45472-5_30
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