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Anonymity for Bitcoin From Secure Escrow Address

Authors :
Qi Wang
Xiangxue Li
Yu Yu
Source :
IEEE Access, Vol 6, Pp 12336-12341 (2018)
Publication Year :
2018
Publisher :
IEEE, 2018.

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.

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
21693536
Volume :
6
Database :
Directory of Open Access Journals
Journal :
IEEE Access
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
edsdoj.1cdcbb3f32104c0d8fe9a449fabad078
Document Type :
article
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2787563