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Lockmix: a secure and privacy-preserving mix service for Bitcoin anonymity

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Abstract

Bitcoin has attracted considerable attention from governments, banks, as well as researchers. However, Bitcoin is not a completely anonymous system. All transaction information in the Bitcoin system is published on the network and can be used to reveal the identity of the user by transaction correlation analysis. In this paper, a secure and privacy-preserving mix service for Bitcoin anonymity, Lockmix, is proposed. Lockmix introduces mix servers to provide a mix service for the user by using blind signature and multi-signature schemes to prevent attackers from linking the input address with the output address. Lockmix provides anonymity, scalability, accountability, Bitcoin compatibility and anti-theft. Lockmix has been implemented on a Bitcoin test network, and experiments show that our solution is efficient.

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Notes

  1. https://github.com/Northeastern-University-Blockchain/Lockmix.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the National Science foundation of China (No.U1708262, 61601107), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No.2019B22214, N1723-04023), and the Foundation of Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory (No. KJ-17-001).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China

    Zijian Bao & Wenbo Shi

  2. Department of Mathematics, Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut, India

    Saru Kumari

  3. Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory, Beijing, China

    Zhi-yin Kong

  4. College of Computer and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China

    Chien-Ming Chen

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  1. Zijian Bao
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  2. Wenbo Shi
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Correspondence to Chien-Ming Chen.

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Bao, Z., Shi, W., Kumari, S. et al. Lockmix: a secure and privacy-preserving mix service for Bitcoin anonymity. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 19, 311–321 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-019-00459-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-019-00459-6

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