Studying Bitcoin Privacy Attacks and Their Impact on Bitcoin-Based Identity Methods

• Published in: Business Process Management: Blockchain and Robotic Process Automation Forum Vol. 428; pp. 85 - 101
• Main Authors: Ghesmati, Simin, Fdhila, Walid, Weippl, Edgar
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2021; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing
• Subjects: Bitcoin; Blockchain; BTCR; Decentralized identifier; DID; Privacy
• ISBN: 9783030858667; 3030858669
• ISSN: 1865-1348; 1865-1356
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-85867-4_7

The Bitcoin blockchain was the first publicly verifiable, and distributed ledger, where it is possible for everyone to download and check the full history of all data records from the genesis block. These properties lead to the emergence of new types of applications and the redesign of traditional systems that no longer respond to current business needs (e.g., transparency, protection against censorship, decentralization). One particular application is the use of blockchain technology to enable decentralized and self-sovereign identities including new mechanisms for creating, resolving, and revoking them. The public availability of data records has, in turn, paved the way for new kinds of attacks that combine sophisticated heuristics with auxiliary information to compromise users’ privacy and deanonymize their identities. In this paper, we review and categorize Bitcoin privacy attacks, investigate their impact on one of the Bitcoin-based identity methods namely did:btcr, and analyze and discuss its privacy properties.