Luxembourg Researchers Find a Way to Unmask Bitcoin Users
One of the older Cray Supercomputers used by the NSA to break ciphers. One of the stated strengths of Bitcoin has, from the beginning, been its ability to provide anonymity and a sense of security on the same level that cash transactions do. When one spends and is paid in cash, the only real record of the transaction which ties the spender to the cash spent is in the spender's possession and recording of a receipt. Bitcoin works in much the same way although a verifiable ledger called the Blockchain exists to keep the system in working order. That is, the Blockchain can be used to verify....
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Days after researchers described an attack that could reveal the identities of individuals who used bitcoin over the Tor anonymity network, a privacy advocate has developed a tool to monitor the occurrence of that attack. The tool, TorBan, is a website that gives information about the Tor exit nodes currently connected to the bitcoin network. If all the connections are fresh, users should be wary of a privacy-invading attack like the one described by the Luxembourg researchers, TorBan's creator Kristov Atlas said, adding: "If you see a bunch of new nodes never seen before, and all of the....
Selling animal by-products like manure and hot dogs is, of course, not new in the world. People have been making fortunes on various forms of literal shit for a long time. The use of manure dates back to the earliest days of agriculture. In more recent times, a marketing guru had an idea that would seem doomed to fail: let people send a box of horse shit to anyone, anonymously, by paying with Bitcoin. Quite a dastardly proposal, but worth a try. Also read: Luxembourg Researchers Find a Way to Unmask Bitcoin Users. When the project began, the CEO of ShitExpress, Peter, wasn't ready for....
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....
Using bitcoin over the anonymity network Tor leaves users at greater risk of having their identities revealed, according to academics at the University of Luxembourg. If that seemingly paradoxical finding isn't enough to scare privacy-loving bitcoiners, the researchers also determined that an attack could be mounted on an "economy" budget of just $2,500 a month. Such an attack could expose the identity of a bitcoin and Tor user, and allow the attacker to meddle with the victim's transactions, they said. Ivan Pustogarov, one of the two researchers working on the issue, explained: "The....
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....