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International Workshop on Graphical Models for Security

GraMSec 2018: Graphical Models for Security pp 1–12Cite as

Tendrils of Crime: Visualizing the Diffusion of Stolen Bitcoins

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNSC,volume 11086)

Abstract

The first six months of 2018 have seen cryptocurrency thefts of $761 million, and the technology is also the latest and greatest tool for money laundering. This increase in crime has caused both researchers and law enforcement to look for ways to trace criminal proceeds. Although tracing algorithms have improved recently, they still yield an enormous amount of data of which very few datapoints are relevant or interesting to investigators, let alone ordinary bitcoin owners interested in provenance. In this work we describe efforts to visualize relevant data on a blockchain. To accomplish this we come up with a graphical model to represent the stolen coins and then implement this using a variety of visualization techniques.

Keywords

  • Bitcoin
  • Cybercrime
  • Cryptocrime
  • Visualization

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Accessible at: https://github.com/TaintChain.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Mansoor Ahmed, Ilia Shumailov & Ross Anderson

Authors
  1. Mansoor Ahmed
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  2. Ilia Shumailov
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  3. Ross Anderson
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mansoor Ahmed .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dartmouth College, Hanover , NH, USA

    Prof. George Cybenko

  2. University College London, London, UK

    David Pym

  3. IRISA, INSA Rennes, Rennes, France

    Barbara Fila

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Ahmed, M., Shumailov, I., Anderson, R. (2019). Tendrils of Crime: Visualizing the Diffusion of Stolen Bitcoins. In: Cybenko, G., Pym, D., Fila, B. (eds) Graphical Models for Security. GraMSec 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11086. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15465-3_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15465-3_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-15464-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15465-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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