EFTA02593730.pdf

From: Vincenzo lozzo < Sent: Monday, November 10, 2014 9:39 AM To: jeffrey E. Cc: Joichi Ito Subject: Bitcoin over Tor considered unsafe This is a very interesting paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.6079v1.pdf It gets technical but the TL;DR is that mobile devices & privacy seeking =itcoin users (mobile devices because they can't hold the whole ledger =ot for privacy reasons) route their bitcoin activities through Tor. These guys showed that you can with roughly 5k a month hijack all the =itcoin clients inside tor and allow both the de- anonymization of the =sers and also potentially to double spending attacks assuming that you =ontrol something like 10% of the network. The two main issues are that 1) Bitcoin has an anti-DoS protection that =s very strict and 2) Bitcoin connections are not =uthenticated/encrypted. It's funny because it's another instance of where Postel's law is right =http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle), in the sense that =ere Bitcoin clients less restrictive then the attack would not be =easible. On the other hand if they were less restrictive the network might get DoSed.. The remediations section is also very interesting because essentially =ne of the solutions proposed is to centralize Bitcoin more.. Again, nothing earth shaking but by now you should start to see a trend =ith Bitcoin and security :-) V=?xml version=.0" encoding=TF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version.=.0"> <dict> <key>conversation-idgkey> <integer>306602</integer> <key>date-last-viewed</key> <integer>0</integer> <key>date-received</key> <integer>1415612324</integer> <key>flags</key> <integer>8590195713</integer> <key>gmail-label-ids</key> <array> <integer>2</integer> </array> <key>remote-id</key> <string>455026</string> </dict> </plist> EFTA_R1_01777267 EFTA02593730