Characterizing Entities in the Bitcoin Blockchain

Bitcoin has created a new exchange paradigm within which financial transactions can be trusted without an intermediary. This premise of a free decentralized transactional network however requires, in its current implementation, unrestricted access to the ledger for peer-based transaction verificatio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE ... International Conference on Data Mining workshops pp. 55 - 62
Main Authors Jourdan, Marc, Blandin, Sebastien, Wynter, Laura, Deshpande, Pralhad
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.11.2018
Subjects
Bipartite graph
Bitcoin
Blockchain
Data mining
Pattern classification
Privacy
Protocols
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Summary:Bitcoin has created a new exchange paradigm within which financial transactions can be trusted without an intermediary. This premise of a free decentralized transactional network however requires, in its current implementation, unrestricted access to the ledger for peer-based transaction verification. A number of studies have shown that, in this pseudonymous context, identities can be leaked based on transaction features or off-network information. In this work, we analyze the information revealed by the pattern of transactions in the neighborhood of a given entity transaction. By definition, these features which pertain to an extended network are not directly controllable by the entity, but might enable leakage of information about transacting entities. We define a number of new features relevant to entity characterization on the Bitcoin Blockchain and study their efficacy in practice. We show that even a weak attacker with shallow data mining knowledge is able to leverage these features to characterize the entity properties.
ISSN:2375-9259
DOI:10.1109/ICDMW.2018.00016