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Decentralisation over Privacy: An Analysis of the Bisq Trade Protocol

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Euro-Par 2021: Parallel Processing Workshops (Euro-Par 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13098))

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Abstract

The Bisq trade protocol is a key component of the Bisq decentralised exchange, allowing users to trade with one another in a decentralised manner. However, the protocol publishes trade data to the Bitcoin blockchain. In this paper, we analyse the privacy risks this creates for users. Specifically, we present two new heuristics, one to identify Bisq trades on the Bitcoin blockchain and another to cluster the addresses used in those trades. We demonstrate that these heuristics are effective in identifying the trading activity of Bisq users and aggregating their trading activity across multiple trades. We conclude with suggestions as to how best to defeat these heuristics and improve the privacy aspects of the Bisq trade protocol.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/bitcoin-core/btcdeb.

  2. 2.

    Source code implementing both heuristics can be found here: https://github.com/Liam-Hickey-Ire/BisqTradeProtocolAnalysisSource.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/Liam-Hickey-Ire/BisqTradeProtocolAnalysisSource/blob/master/Data/670026/our-deposit-tx-hashes.csv: This CSV file lists the deposit transaction hashes of every trade identified by our heuristic.

  4. 4.

    Protocol Buffers is a data serialisation mechanism developed by Google, similar in function to other data serialisation mechanisms such as JSON or XML.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/Liam-Hickey-Ire/BisqTradeProtocolAnalysisSource/blob/master/Data/670026/bisq-deposit-tx-hashes.csv: Each line of this CSV file lists the deposit transaction hashes of every Bisq trade retrieved from TradeStatistics2, with corrupted and duplicate entries removed.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/bisq-network/bisq/issues/3893.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, Institute of Technology, Carlow, Carlow, Republic of Ireland

    Liam Hickey & Martin Harrigan

Authors
  1. Liam Hickey
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  2. Martin Harrigan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Liam Hickey .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ricardo Chaves

  2. Department of Computer Engineering, CiTIUS, University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, La Coruña, Spain

    Dora B. Heras

  3. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Aleksandar Ilic

  4. Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Didem Unat

  5. Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain

    Rosa M. Badia

  6. University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

    Andrea Bracciali

  7. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA

    Patrick Diehl

  8. Mathematics and Computer Science, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, USA

    Anshu Dubey

  9. Ajou University, Suwon, Korea (Republic of)

    Oh Sangyoon

  10. Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, TN, USA

    Stephen L. Scott

  11. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Laura Ricci

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Hickey, L., Harrigan, M. (2022). Decentralisation over Privacy: An Analysis of the Bisq Trade Protocol. In: Chaves, R., et al. Euro-Par 2021: Parallel Processing Workshops. Euro-Par 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13098. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06156-1_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06156-1_17

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06155-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06156-1

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