Cited by 193Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-votingBlockchain Technology Applications and SecurityPrivacy, Security, and Data Protection

Bitcoin over Tor isn't a Good Idea

Open access
Biryukov, Alex, Pustogarov, Ivan·2015·2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

Abstract

Bit coin is a decentralized P2P digital currency in which coins are generated by a distributed set of miners and transactions are broadcasted via a peer-to-peer network. While Bit coin provides some level of anonymity (or rather pseudonymity) by encouraging the users to have any number of random-looking Bit coin addresses, recent research shows that this level of anonymity is rather low. This encourages users to connect to the Bit coin network through anonymizers like Tor and motivates development of default Tor functionality for popular mobile SPV clients. In this paper we show that combining Tor and Bit coin creates a new attack vector. A low-resource attacker can gain full control of information flows between all users who chose to use Bit coin over Tor. In particular the attacker can link together user's transactions regardless of pseudonyms used, control which Bit coin blocks and transactions are relayed to user and can delay or discard user's transactions and blocks. Moreover, we show how an attacker can fingerprint users and then recognize them and learn their IP addresses when they decide to connect to the Bit coin network directly.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1109/sp.2015.15

Cites

9 of 9 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Actual SMPC approaches are starting to be used in production along with Homomorphic Encryption (HE), Garbled circuit (GC), linear secret sharing (LSS) and oblivious RAM constructions.

    “Actual SMPC approaches are starting to be used in production along with Homomorphic Encryption (HE), Garbled circuit (GC), linear secret sharing (LSS) and oblivious RAM constructions [99].”

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 10 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Biryukov, A., & Pustogarov, I.
Affiliations
University of Luxembourg (LU)
Venue
2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2015-05
Pages
122-134
ISSN
1081-6011 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W1879677957
Cited by
193
References
10
Citations by year
2026: 4 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 17 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 26 · 2020: 24 · 2019: 30 · 2018: 24 · 2017: 14 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 5
FWCI
9.77
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
Keywords
Bitcoin, Tor, anonymity, pseudonymity, blockchain attacks, decentralized digital currency

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review