Anonymity for Bitcoin from Secure Escrow Address

Qi Wang, Xiangxue Li*, Yu Yu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

36 Scopus citations

Abstract

Bitcoin is promoted as decentralized cryptocurrency by using pseudonym to achieve anonymity. Unfortunately, numerous seminal works have demonstrated that Bitcoin only offers weak anonymity in practice. Indeed, the practical technologies of clustering and flow analysis are much effective for tracing Bitcoin transaction and thereby revealing the owner involved. Otherwise said, user's privacy in Bitcoin has been sadly degenerated to be linkable. In this paper, we propose a completely decentralized scheme that can provide full anonymity in Bitcoin. The idea behind the output is to exploit a secure escrow address, which is consensual by all the involved users. The escrow address is generated from the trick of cryptographically secure distributed key generation and can then be used for mixing transactions in Bitcoin. Our protocol is secure against malicious adversaries. The users can jointly perform the protocol and successfully accomplish the transaction without the help of any (trusted) third party and no extra fees. Besides, our proposal is completely compatible with the current Bitcoin architecture.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)12336-12341
Number of pages6
JournalIEEE Access
Volume6
DOIs
StatePublished - 26 Dec 2017

Keywords

  • Bitcoin
  • address shuffling
  • anonymity
  • distribute key generation
  • privacy

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