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Perimeter: A Network-Layer Attack on the Anonymity of Cryptocurrencies

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12674))

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Abstract

Cryptocurrencies are widely used today for anonymous transactions. Such currencies rely on a peer-to-peer network where users can broadcast transactions containing their pseudonyms and ask for approval. Previous research has shown that application-level eavesdroppers, meaning nodes connected to a large portion of the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network, are able to deanonymize multiple users by tracing back the source of transactions. Yet, such attacks are highly visible as the attacker needs to maintain thousands of outbound connections. Moreover, they can be mitigated by purely application-layer countermeasures.

This paper presents a stealthier and harder-to-mitigate attack exploiting the interactions between the networking and application layers. Particularly, the adversary combines her access over Internet infrastructure with application-layer information to deanonymize transactions. We show that this attack, namely Perimeter, is practical in today’s Internet, achieves high accuracy in Bitcoin, and generalizes to encrypted cryptocurrencies e.g., Ethereum.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Similar techniques could be applied to Ethereum.

  2. 2.

    We mention the modifications that are relevant to our work.

  3. 3.

    Such an attack is very harmful to the victim because an attacker can often link all other transactions the victim made to the deanonymized one [39].

  4. 4.

    Finding the IP of a person is practical as it is revealed every time this person visits a website or an application e.g., skype call.

  5. 5.

    Ethereum facilitates connecting to a client using its IP (i.e., discovery v4 UDP packet).

  6. 6.

    We do not allow incoming connections to prevent attacks from light clients during the experiment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Maria Apostolaki, Cedric Maire & Laurent Vanbever

Authors
  1. Maria Apostolaki
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  2. Cedric Maire
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  3. Laurent Vanbever
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maria Apostolaki .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Nikita Borisov

  2. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Claudia Diaz

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Apostolaki, M., Maire, C., Vanbever, L. (2021). Perimeter: A Network-Layer Attack on the Anonymity of Cryptocurrencies. In: Borisov, N., Diaz, C. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12674. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64322-8_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64322-8_7

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