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Dandelion: Redesigning the Bitcoin Network for Anonymity

Dandelion: Redesigning the Bitcoin Network for Anonymity Dandelion: Redesigning the Bitcoin Network for Anonymity SHAILESHH BOJJA VENKATAKRISHNAN, GIULIA FANTI, and PRAMOD VISWANATH, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have surged in popularity over the last decade. Although Bitcoin does not claim to provide anonymity for its users, it enjoys a public perception of being a privacy-preserving financial system. In reality, cryptocurrencies publish users' entire transaction histories in plaintext, albeit under a pseudonym; this is required for transaction validation. Therefore, if a user's pseudonym can be linked to their human identity, the privacy fallout can be significant. Recently, researchers have demonstrated deanonymization attacks that exploit weaknesses in the Bitcoin network's peer-to-peer (P2P) networking protocols. In particular, the P2P network currently forwards content in a structured way that allows observers to deanonymize users. In this work, we redesign the P2P network from first principles with the goal of providing strong, provable anonymity guarantees. We propose a simple networking policy called Dandelion which provides quasi-optimal, network-wide anonymity, with minimal cost to the network's utility. We also discuss practical implementation challenges and propose heuristic solutions. CCS Concepts: · Networks Network privacy and anonymity; Peer-to-peer networks; Peer-to-peer protocols; Topology analysis and generation; · Information systems Digital cash; http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems Association for Computing Machinery

Dandelion: Redesigning the Bitcoin Network for Anonymity

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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
2476-1249
DOI
10.1145/3084459
Publisher site
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Abstract

Dandelion: Redesigning the Bitcoin Network for Anonymity SHAILESHH BOJJA VENKATAKRISHNAN, GIULIA FANTI, and PRAMOD VISWANATH, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have surged in popularity over the last decade. Although Bitcoin does not claim to provide anonymity for its users, it enjoys a public perception of being a privacy-preserving financial system. In reality, cryptocurrencies publish users' entire transaction histories in plaintext, albeit under a pseudonym; this is required for transaction validation. Therefore, if a user's pseudonym can be linked to their human identity, the privacy fallout can be significant. Recently, researchers have demonstrated deanonymization attacks that exploit weaknesses in the Bitcoin network's peer-to-peer (P2P) networking protocols. In particular, the P2P network currently forwards content in a structured way that allows observers to deanonymize users. In this work, we redesign the P2P network from first principles with the goal of providing strong, provable anonymity guarantees. We propose a simple networking policy called Dandelion which provides quasi-optimal, network-wide anonymity, with minimal cost to the network's utility. We also discuss practical implementation challenges and propose heuristic solutions. CCS Concepts: · Networks Network privacy and anonymity; Peer-to-peer networks; Peer-to-peer protocols; Topology analysis and generation; · Information systems Digital cash;

Journal

Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems – Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Jun 13, 2017

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