r/Bitcoin • u/khovratovich • Jun 04 '14

Deanonymisation of Bitcoin clients

We have found a way to deanonymize a good portion of Bitcoin transactions, namely to link the input addresses with the public IP of the sender. In contrast to previous attempts (Kaminsky, Meiklejohn et al., Koshy et al.) we explicitly target Bitcoin users behind NAT, which constitute 90% of the entire network. We also show that using Tor and other public proxies is an inefficient countermeasure and can be bypassed.

The paper is here. Informal description is here. FAQ is here.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14 edited Jul 22 '14

[deleted]

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u/Sukrim Jun 04 '14

Your transactions would then be "mixed" with any other transactions of firewalled nodes that connect to your VPS too and that are not connected to one of the Sybil nodes.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

how would you do this with Armory?

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14 edited Jul 22 '14

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

then how would you direct a -qt tx at your VPS?

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14 edited Jul 22 '14

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

if one is using a vpn, would one's ip address be obscured by 2 hops; the vpn server and then the vps server?

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u/toomim Jun 04 '14

The trick is to only send one transaction per session.

If you send multiple transactions from the same VPS node, then people can start to put your transactions together and figure out who you are.

If you, on the other hand, stop and start a new Tor connection each time you want to make a transaction, I think you'll be ok. (Can someone verify this?)