Certified Bitcoins
- 13 Citations
- 2.2k Downloads
Abstract
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer (p2p) electronic cash system that uses a distributed timestamp service to record transactions in a public ledger (called the Blockchain). A critical component of Bitcoin’s success is the decentralized nature of its architecture, which does not require or even support the establishment of trusted authorities. Yet the absence of certification creates obstacles to its wider acceptance in e-commerce and official uses. We propose a certification system for Bitcoin that offers: a) an opt-in guarantee to send and receive bitcoins only to/ from certified users; b) control of creation of bitcoins addresses (certified users) by trusted authorities. Our proposal may encourage the adoption of Bitcoin in different scenarios that require an officially recognized currency, such as tax payments—often an integral part of e-commerce transactions.
Keywords
Hash Function Signature Scheme Random Oracle Model Honest Party Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm ProblemReferences
- 1.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)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 2.Andrychowicz, M., Dziembowski, S., Malinowski, D., Mazurek, Ł.: Secure multiparty computations on bitcoin. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2013/784 (2013), http://eprint.iacr.org/
- 3.Ateniese, G., de Medeiros, B.: A provably secure nyberg-rueppel signature variant with applications. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2004/093 (2004), http://eprint.iacr.org/
- 4.Barber, S., Boyen, X., Shi, E., Uzun, E.: Bitter to better how to make bitcoin a better currency. In: Keromytis, A.D. (ed.) FC 2012. LNCS, vol. 7397, pp. 399–414. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 5.Brown, D.R.L.: The exact security of ecdsa. Technical report, Advances in Elliptic Curve Cryptography (2000)Google Scholar
- 6.Chaum, D.: Blind signatures for untraceable payments. In: Chaum, D., Rivest, R.L., Sherman, A.T. (eds.) CRYPTO, pp. 199–203. Plenum Press, New York (1982)Google Scholar
- 7.Girault, M.: Self-certified public keys. In: Davies, D.W. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1991. LNCS, vol. 547, pp. 490–497. Springer, Heidelberg (1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 8.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, IMC 2013, pp. 127–140. ACM, New York (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 9.Miers, I., Garman, C., Green, M., Rubin, A.D.: Zerocoin: Anonymous distributed e-cash from bitcoin. In: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP 2013, pp. 397–411. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 10.Naccache, D., Pointcheval, D., Stern, J.: Twin signatures: an alternative to the hash-and-sign paradigm. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS), pp. 20–27 (2001)Google Scholar
- 11.Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Consulted 1, 2012 (2008)Google Scholar
- 12.Nyberg, K., Rueppel, R.: A new signature scheme based on the DSA giving message recovery. In: Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS 1993), pp. 58–61. ACM Press (1993)Google Scholar
- 13.Ober, M., Katzenbeisser, S., Hamacher, K.: Structure and anonymity of the bitcoin transaction graph. Future Internet 5(2), 237–250 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 14.Petersen, H., Horster, P.: Self-certified keys – concepts and applications. In: Proceedings of the Third Conference on Communications and Multimedia Security. Chapman & Hall (1997)Google Scholar
- 15.Pointcheval, D., Stern, J.: Security proofs for signature schemes. In: Maurer, U.M. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1996. LNCS, vol. 1070, pp. 387–398. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 16.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)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 17.Saeednia, S.: A note on girault’s self-certified model. Information Processing Letters 86(6), 323–327 (2003)CrossRefzbMATHMathSciNetGoogle Scholar
- 18.Wired.com. Bitcoin bubble bursts as china cracks down on digital currency (December 2013), http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/china_crackdown/
- 19.X9.62-2005, Public Key Cryptography for the Financial Services Industry: The Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Standard (ECDSA) (November 2005)Google Scholar