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Studying Bitcoin Privacy Attacks and Their Impact on Bitcoin-Based Identity Methods

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Business Process Management: Blockchain and Robotic Process Automation Forum (BPM 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 428))

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Abstract

The Bitcoin blockchain was the first publicly verifiable, and distributed ledger, where it is possible for everyone to download and check the full history of all data records from the genesis block. These properties lead to the emergence of new types of applications and the redesign of traditional systems that no longer respond to current business needs (e.g., transparency, protection against censorship, decentralization). One particular application is the use of blockchain technology to enable decentralized and self-sovereign identities including new mechanisms for creating, resolving, and revoking them. The public availability of data records has, in turn, paved the way for new kinds of attacks that combine sophisticated heuristics with auxiliary information to compromise users’ privacy and deanonymize their identities. In this paper, we review and categorize Bitcoin privacy attacks, investigate their impact on one of the Bitcoin-based identity methods namely did:btcr, and analyze and discuss its privacy properties.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://haveibeenpwned.com/.

  2. 2.

    https://www.w3.org/TR/2021/CRD-did-core-20210609/.

  3. 3.

    https://ipfs.io/.

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Acknowledgments

This research is based upon work partially supported by (1) SBA Research (SBA-K1); SBA Research is a COMET Center within the COMET – Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies Programme and funded by BMK, BMDW, and the federal state of Vienna. The COMET Programme is managed by FFG. (2) the FFG ICT of the Future project 874019 dIdentity & dApps. (3) the FFG Basisprogramm Kleinprojekt 39019756 Decentralised Marketplace for Digital Identity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SBA Research, Vienna, Austria

    Simin Ghesmati, Walid Fdhila & Edgar Weippl

  2. Vienna University of technology, Vienna, Austria

    Simin Ghesmati

  3. University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Walid Fdhila & Edgar Weippl

Authors
  1. Simin Ghesmati
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  2. Walid Fdhila
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  3. Edgar Weippl
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simin Ghesmati .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Escuela TĂ©cnica Superior de IngenierĂ­a, Seville, Spain

    José González Enríquez

  2. IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Søren Debois

  3. German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Saarland University, SaarbrĂĽcken, Germany

    Peter Fettke

  4. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Pierluigi Plebani

  5. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Inge van de Weerd

  6. TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Ingo Weber

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Ghesmati, S., Fdhila, W., Weippl, E. (2021). Studying Bitcoin Privacy Attacks and Their Impact on Bitcoin-Based Identity Methods. In: González Enríquez, J., Debois, S., Fettke, P., Plebani, P., van de Weerd, I., Weber, I. (eds) Business Process Management: Blockchain and Robotic Process Automation Forum. BPM 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 428. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85867-4_7

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