Research Article
The Bitcoin Hunter: Detecting Bitcoin Traffic over Encrypted Channels
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-030-63086-7_10, author={Fatemeh Rezaei and Shahrzad Naseri and Ittay Eyal and Amir Houmansadr}, title={The Bitcoin Hunter: Detecting Bitcoin Traffic over Encrypted Channels}, proceedings={Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. 16th EAI International Conference, SecureComm 2020, Washington, DC, USA, October 21-23, 2020, Proceedings, Part I}, proceedings_a={SECURECOMM}, year={2020}, month={12}, keywords={Bitcoin Traffic analysis Blocking-resistance}, doi={10.1007/978-3-030-63086-7_10} }- Fatemeh Rezaei
Shahrzad Naseri
Ittay Eyal
Amir Houmansadr
Year: 2020
The Bitcoin Hunter: Detecting Bitcoin Traffic over Encrypted Channels
SECURECOMM
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-63086-7_10
Abstract
Bitcoin and similar blockchain-based currencies are significant to consumers and industry because of their applications in electronic commerce and other trust-based distributed systems. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to the consumers and industry to maintain reliable access to their Bitcoin assets. In this paper, we investigate the resilience of Bitcoin to blocking by the powerful network entities such as ISPs and governments. By characterizing Bitcoin’s communication patterns, we design classifiers that can distinguish (and therefore block) Bitcoin traffic even if it is tunneled through an encrypted channel like Tor and even if Bitcoin traffic is being mixed with background traffic, e.g., due to browsing websites. We perform extensive experiments to demonstrate the reliability of our classifiers in identifying Bitcoin traffic even despite using obfuscation protocols like Tor Pluggable Ttransports. We conclude that standard obfuscation mechanisms are not enough to ensure blocking-resilient access to Bitcoin (and similar cryptocurrencies), therefore cryptocurrency operators should deploy tailored traffic obfuscation mechanisms.
