Using ethereum transactions to deanonymize senders

The historic rise of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies to over $327 billion in market capitalization has sparked significant research efforts studying their reliability, performance, and security. Bitcoin, the highest valued cryptocurrency, has received the most thorough scrutiny, with many studies analyzing its peer properties and network health. In contrast, the network layer for Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, has gone mostly ignored, even though it employs different algorithms for transaction propagation. In this thesis, we perform timing analysis on transactions propagated through Ethereum networks to identify the origin nodes. We build a tool called TxSniper to verify our approach on Ethereum's main network. We find that we can identify the origin with a 70% probability; this method is not always effective due to presence of nodes running clients that use different implementations of transaction propagation.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical & Computer Engr

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2018

Author dc:creator

• Murali, Siddharth

Contributors dc:contributor

• Bailey, Michael D

• Ethereum
• Cryptocurrency
• Security
• Deanonymization

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2018 Siddharth Murali

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101616

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/101616