Visible to the public Bit-FP: A Traffic Fingerprinting Approach for Bitcoin Hidden Service Detection

TitleBit-FP: A Traffic Fingerprinting Approach for Bitcoin Hidden Service Detection
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2021
AuthorsZou, Kexin, Shi, Jinqiao, Gao, Yue, Wang, Xuebin, Wang, Meiqi, Li, Zeyu, Su, Majing
Conference Name2021 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Data Science in Cyberspace (DSC)
Keywordsbitcoin, bitcoin security, Conferences, Cyberspace, Fingerprint recognition, Forestry, Human Behavior, Online banking, pubcrawl, Scalability, Tor hidden service, Traffic analysis, Traffic Control, website fingerprinting
AbstractBitcoin is a virtual encrypted digital currency based on a peer-to-peer network. In recent years, for higher anonymity, more and more Bitcoin users try to use Tor hidden services for identity and location hiding. However, previous studies have shown that Tor are vulnerable to traffic fingerprinting attack, which can identify different websites by identifying traffic patterns using statistical features of traffic. Our work shows that traffic fingerprinting attack is also effective for the Bitcoin hidden nodes detection. In this paper, we proposed a novel lightweight Bitcoin hidden service traffic fingerprinting, using a random decision forest classifier with features from TLS packet size and direction. We test our attack on a novel dataset, including a foreground set of Bitcoin hidden node traffic and a background set of different hidden service websites and various Tor applications traffic. We can detect Bitcoin hidden node from different Tor clients and website hidden services with a precision of 0.989 and a recall of 0.987, which is higher than the previous model.
DOI10.1109/DSC53577.2021.00021
Citation Keyzou_bit-fp_2021