'Eavesdropping' Attack Can Unmask Up to 60% of Bitcoin Clients
Settling that purchase from Silk Road 2.0 or perhaps Porn.com with some anonymous cryptocurrency? Or perhaps you're simply completing an innocuous hotel booking with Expedia. Either way, don't be too sure that your bitcoin buys will remain unconnected from your real-world identity. A new study from the University of Luxembourg has found that an attacker with a couple of spare laptops and a $2,000 budget could deanonymise up to 60% of bitcoin clients on the network, tying bitcoin addresses to IP addresses. Perhaps even more disturbingly, such attacks could be taking place currently, an....
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This collusion between both parties was confirmed by Judge Richard A. Jones late last night and provides valuable insights as to how US law enforcement doesn't care all that much about human rights or privacy. Ever since Silk Road 2.0 was shut down by law enforcement, there has been one particular shred of evidence which has been a point of debate. Some people were fairly certain the FBI would not have been able to arrest Brian “DoctorClu” Farrell if law enforcement did not breach the Tor protocol. As it turns out, this is exactly what happened, and Carnegie Mellon University helped the....
Kristov Atlas has developed a quick tool called TorBan which can warn of a Bitcoin-over-Tor de-anonymization attack, called the "Luxembourg Attack." The "Luxembourg Attack," first described by University of Luxembourg researchers Ivan Pustogarov and Alex Biryukov earlier this year, involves the use of thousands of Bitcoin nodes and a handful of controlled Tor exit nodes to "de-anonymize" users using Bitcoin over Tor. The Luxembourg research paper, titled "Bitcoin over Tor isn't a good idea" detailed the potential attack. The Bitcoin network has built-in denial-of-service (DoS) attack....
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