Abstract
Over the past eighteen months, the digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin has experienced significant growth in terms of usage and adoption. It has also been predicted that if this growth continues then it will become an increasingly useful tool for various illegal activities. Against this background, it seems safe to assume that students and professionals of digital forensics will require an understanding of the subject. New technologies are often a major challenge to the field of digital forensics due to the technical and legal challenges they introduce. This paper provides a set of tutorials for Bitcoin that allows for learners from both backgrounds to be taught how it operates, and how it may impact on their working practice. Earlier this year they were delivered to a cohort of third year undergraduates. To the author’s knowledge, this represents the first integration of the topic into a digital forensics programme by a higher education provider.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system (2008). https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. Accessed 25 June 2016
Möser, M., Böhme, R., Breuker, D.: An inquiry into money laundering tools in the Bitcoin ecosystem. In: eCrime Researchers Summit (eCRS), pp. 1–14. IEEE (2013)
Ron, D., Shamir, A.: Quantitative analysis of the full Bitcoin transaction graph. In: Sadeghi, A.-R. (ed.) FC 2013. LNCS, vol. 7859, pp. 6–24. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-39884-1_2
Kharraz, A., Robertson, W., Balzarotti, D., Bilge, L., Kirda, E.: Cutting the gordian knot: a look under the hood of ransomware attacks. In: Almgren, M., Gulisano, V., Maggi, F. (eds.) DIMVA 2015. LNCS, vol. 9148, pp. 3–24. Springer, Heidelberg (2015). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-20550-2_1
Honey, P., Mumford, A.: The Manual of Learning Styles. Peter Honey Publications, Maidenhead (1992)
Mitchell, I., Sheriff, M.: Lecture, exercise, apply and feedback: turning a new leaf in curriculum design. In: 18th International Conference on Software Process Improvement, Research and Education, INSPIRE 2013. The British Computer Society (2013)
Back, A.: Hashcash-a denial of service counter-measure (2002). http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf. Accessed 25 June 2016
Biryukov, A., Pustogarov, I.: Bitcoin over Tor isn’t a good idea. In: 2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 122–134. IEEE (2015)
Androulaki, E., Karame, G.O., Roeschlin, M., Scherer, T., Capkun, S.: Evaluating user privacy in Bitcoin. In: Sadeghi, A.-R. (ed.) FC 2013. LNCS, vol. 7859, pp. 34–51. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-39884-1_4
Antonopoulos, A.M.: Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies. O’Reilly Media Inc., Sebastopol (2014)
Koshy, P., Koshy, D., McDaniel, P.: An analysis of anonymity in Bitcoin using P2P network traffic. In: Christin, N., Safavi-Naini, R. (eds.) FC 2014. LNCS, vol. 8437, pp. 469–485. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). doi:10.1007/978-3-662-45472-5_30
Meiklejohn, S., Pomarole, M., Jordan, G., Levchenko, K., McCoy, D., Voelker, G.M., Savage, S.: A fistful of Bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names. In: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 127–140. ACM (2013)
Reid, F., Harrigan, M.: An analysis of anonymity in the Bitcoin system. In: Altshuler, Y., Elovici, Y., Cremers, A.B., Aharony, N., Pentland, A. (eds.) Security and Privacy in Social Networks, pp. 197–223. Springer, New York (2013)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Neilson, D., Hara, S., Mitchell, I. (2016). Bitcoin Forensics: A Tutorial. In: Jahankhani, H., et al. Global Security, Safety and Sustainability - The Security Challenges of the Connected World. ICGS3 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 630. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51064-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51064-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-51063-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-51064-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)