Authors
Elli Androulaki, Ghassan O Karame, Marc Roeschlin, Tobias Scherer, Srdjan Capkun
Publication date
2013
Conference
Financial Cryptography and Data Security: 17th International Conference, FC 2013, Okinawa, Japan, April 1-5, 2013, Revised Selected Papers 17
Pages
34-51
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Description
Bitcoin is quickly emerging as a popular digital payment system. However, in spite of its reliance on pseudonyms, Bitcoin raises a number of privacy concerns due to the fact that all of the transactions that take place are publicly announced in the system.
In this paper, we investigate the privacy provisions in Bitcoin when it is used as a primary currency to support the daily transactions of individuals in a university setting. More specifically, we evaluate the privacy that is provided by Bitcoin (i) by analyzing the genuine Bitcoin system and (ii) through a simulator that faithfully mimics the use of Bitcoin within a university. In this setting, our results show that the profiles of almost 40% of the users can be, to a large extent, recovered even when users adopt privacy measures recommended by Bitcoin. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that comprehensively analyzes, and evaluates the privacy …
Total citations
Scholar articles
E Androulaki, GO Karame, M Roeschlin, T Scherer… - Financial Cryptography and Data Security: 17th …, 2013