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International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security

FC 2014: Financial Cryptography and Data Security pp 57–71Cite as

Empirical Analysis of Denial-of-Service Attacks in the Bitcoin Ecosystem

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8438))

Abstract

We present an empirical investigation into the prevalence and impact of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on operators in the Bitcoin economy. To that end, we gather and analyze posts mentioning “DDoS” on the popular Bitcoin forum bitcointalk.org. Starting from around 3 000 different posts made between May 2011 and October 2013, we document 142 unique DDoS attacks on 40 Bitcoin services. We find that 7 % of all known operators have been attacked, but that currency exchanges, mining pools, gambling operators, eWallets, and financial services are much more likely to be attacked than other services. Not coincidentally, we find currency exchanges and mining pools are much more likely to have DDoS protection such as CloudFlare, Incapsula, or Amazon Cloud. We show that those services that have been attacked are more than three times as likely to buy anti-DDoS services than operators who have not been attacked. We find that big mining pools (those with historical hashrate shares of at least 5 %) are much more likely to be DDoSed than small pools. We investigate Mt. Gox as a case study for DDoS attacks on currency exchanges and find a disproportionate amount of DDoS reports made during the large spike in trading volume and exchange rates in spring 2013. We conclude by outlining future opportunities for researching DDoS attacks on Bitcoin.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers and paper shepherd Fergal Reid for their helpful feedback. This work was partially funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate, Cyber Security Division (DHS S&T/CSD) Broad Agency Announcement 11.02, the Government of Australia and SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific via contract number N66001-13-C-0131. This paper represents the position of the authors and not that of the aforementioned agencies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Engineering Department, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA

    Marie Vasek, Micah Thornton & Tyler Moore

Authors
  1. Marie Vasek
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  2. Micah Thornton
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  3. Tyler Moore
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tyler Moore .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Rainer Böhme

  2. University of Hannover, Hannover, Niedersachsen, Germany

    Michael Brenner

  3. Southern Methodist University CS and Engineering Department, Dallas, Texas, USA

    Tyler Moore

  4. University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Matthew Smith

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Vasek, M., Thornton, M., Moore, T. (2014). Empirical Analysis of Denial-of-Service Attacks in the Bitcoin Ecosystem. In: Böhme, R., Brenner, M., Moore, T., Smith, M. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8438. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44774-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44774-1_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-44773-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-44774-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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