Anonymity and the Obfuscation Issues in the Cryptographic Currency: Bitcoin

Abstract

Bitcoin is the cryptographic currency where all transactions are recorded in the blockchain-a public, global, and immutable ledger. Because transactions are public, Bitcoin and its users employ obfuscation to maintain a degree of financial privacy. Critically, and in contrast to typical uses of obfuscation, in Bitcoin obfuscation is not aimed against the system designer but is instead enabled by design. We map sixteen proposed privacy-preserving techniques for Bitcoin on an obfuscation-vs.-cryptography axis, and find that those that are used in practice tend toward obfuscation. We argue that this has led to a balance between privacy and regulatory acceptance.

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International Journal Of Engineering And Computer Science ISSN:2319-7242
Volume 6 Issue 7 July 2017, Page No. 22016-22019
Index Copernicus value (2015): 58.10 DOI: 10.18535/ijecs/v6i7.19
Rishav Chatterjee, IJECS Volume 6 Issue 7 July 2017 Page No. 22016-22019 Page 22016
Anonymity and the Obfuscation Issues in the Cryptographic Currency:
Bitcoin
Rishav Chatterjee
Under Graduate Student
School of Computer Science & Engineering
Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology
Bhubaneswar, India
rishavpiku@gmail.com
Abstract. Bitcoin is the cryptographic currency where all transactions are recorded in the blockchain — a public,
global, and immutable ledger. Because transactions are public, Bitcoin and its users employ obfuscation to maintain a
degree of financial privacy. Critically, and in contrast to typical uses of obfuscation, in Bitcoin obfuscation is not
aimed against the system designer but is instead enabled by design. We map sixteen proposed privacy-preserving
techniques for Bitcoin on an obfuscation-vs.-cryptography axis, and find that those that are used in practice tend
toward obfuscation. We argue that this has led to a balance between privacy and regulatory acceptance.
Keywords Obuscation, security, privacy, cryptography.
Introduction
Bitcoin’s design is centered around a widely
distributed, global database which stores all
transactions that have ever taken place in the system.
Thus, there is no avenue for redress if a user wishes to
retrospectively hide a transaction. Further, nothing in
the ledger is encrypted, and digital signatures are
mandatory, ensuring cryptographic attribution of
activities to users. On the other hand, account
identifiers in Bitcoin take the form of cryptographic
public keys, which are pseudonymous. Anyone can
use Bitcoin “wallet” software to trivially generate a
new public key and use it as a pseudonym to send or
receive payments without registering or providing
personal information. However, pseudonymity alone
provides little privacy, and there are many ways in
which identities could be linked to these pseudonyms
(Narayanan et al., 2016).
Obscurity Issues
To counter this, Bitcoin and its users employ a variety
of obfuscation techniques to increase their financial
privacy. We visualize a representative selection of
these techniques in Figure 1 based on their time of
invention/creation and our assessment of their
similarity to obfuscation vs cryptography. We make
several observations. First, techniques used in Bitcoin
predominantly fall into obfuscation, with stronger
techniques being used exclusively in alternative
cryptocurrencies (altcoins). Second, there is a trend
towards stronger techniques over time, perhaps due to
a growing interest in privacy and to the greater
difficulty of developing cryptographic techniques.
Third, obfuscation techniques proposed at later points
in time are seeing less adoption, arguably a result of
their increased complexity and need for coordination
among participants (Möser & Böhme 2017).

DOI: 10.18535/ijecs/v6i7.19
Rishav Chatterjee, IJECS Volume 6 Issue 7 July 2017 Page No. 22016-22019 Page 22017
Figure 1: Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for
Bitcoin. The X-axis is the date of invention and the
Y-axis is an informal measure that combines the
sophistication of the technique and the strength of
the privacy guarantee. See Appendix 1 for
references and dates.2
Among the techniques used in Bitcoin, the most
prevalent can be characterized as “ambiguating
obfuscation” (Brunton & Nissenbaum 2015):
effectively reducing the information an adversary is
able to extract from a particular transaction.
Examples include using a new pseudonym for every
new transaction and randomizing the structure of
transactions to make the spend to the “true” recipient
indistinguishable from “change” going back to the
sender.
A second type of obfuscation, namely “cooperative
obfuscation”, has risen in popularity over the last
years. For example, users can send their money to a
service that will “mix” their funds with those of other
users, thereby obfuscating the flow of payments (cf.
Möser, Böhme & Breuker 2013). A similar technique
called CoinJoin works in a peer-to-peer fashion and
doesn’t require a trusted intermediary is CoinJoin.
Due to the need for these users to find and transact
with each other, markets for anonymity have arisen
that bring together providers and receivers of
anonymity (Möser & Böhme 2016).
Objectives and Ways for Obscuring Data
The ultimate objective behind obfuscating the data that
is being transfered is to minimize the risk of disclosure
resulting from providing access to the data.
Moreover, it also enhances the analytical usefulness of
the data.
There are several methods for obfuscation of data such
as Topcoding, Grouping, Adding or Multiplying noise
and Rank Swaping. A good amount of research needs
to be done in this domain.
The Case for Obfuscation
Critically, none of the techniques discussed provide
provable privacy guarantees through cryptography.
While these do exist and have been deployed (e.g.,
Zcash), they are far from being adopted by the
Bitcoin community, for both technical and political
reasons. On the technical side, Bitcoin’s
decentralization already incurs a severe performance
penalty compared to centralized payment systems
such as Paypal. Achieving cryptographic privacy
would further degrade performance. Obfuscation also
has a lighter impact on the
usefulness of the blockchain for non-currency
applications. The current design allows selectively
employing obfuscation, leaving room for other uses
that prioritize different goals, such as Colored Coins
(Rosenfeld 2012), a protocol for representing assets
on top of the Bitcoin blockchain.
On the political side, providing stronger privacy
through cryptography might make Bitcoin even more
attractive for activities such as money laundering,
ransomware, or terrorism financing, and thereby

DOI: 10.18535/ijecs/v6i7.19
Rishav Chatterjee, IJECS Volume 6 Issue 7 July 2017 Page No. 22016-22019 Page 22018
tempt a government crackdown. Much of the Bitcoin
community is invested in its mainstream adoption,
and therefore keen to avoid such an outcome. When
Bitcoin began to be noticed by the press, members of
the community went to work explaining it to policy
makers. They framed the technology as neutral and
unthreatening, and the Bitcoin ecosystem as subject
to existing regulations and amenable to new ones (cf.
Brito 2013, Brito & Castillo 2013, Lee 2013, Murck
2013, Hattem 2014).
The use of obfuscation in Bitcoin may have achieved
a balancing act between the financial privacy of its
users and the investigatory needs of law enforcement
and regulators. Law enforcement agencies have two
important advantages over everyday adversaries: the
budget for specialized Bitcoin tracking tools and
services (Cox 2017), and subpoena power. The latter
allows deanonymizing selected actors by obtaining
user records from exchanges and cross-referencing
them with the results of blockchain analysis
(Meiklejohn et al. 2013). Since only a few
governmental actors possess these powers, users still
enjoy a measure of financial privacy. Thus, the
imperfect privacy protection in Bitcoin may be one of
the keys to its success.
Conclusion
This paper shows us the anonymity of bitcoin. Bitcoin
transactions are nothing but electronic transactions
which can be done without blindly believing in a
central authority.
We could remove the problem of double spending
because of the peer-to-peer network
which has been used to eradicate this major issue.
Public history of the transactions are being kept as a
record and that is essentially known as Proof-of-work.
But it is computationally impossible. In this paper, we
conjecture that, as the number of users of obfuscation
grows, the visibility of the use of obfuscation
increases as well. It also reduces the quality of the
information that can be extracted from the system.
We argue that initially, the use of obfuscation is
mostly unnoticed as the user base and its impact is
small.
The success of obfuscation in Bitcoin motivates
studying the adoption of obfuscation in
sociotechnical systems more generally.
The first is to hide the use of obfuscation for as long
as possible through both social and technical means.
The second is to maximize the visibility of
obfuscation and campaign for its acceptance once it
can no longer remain unnoticed. This is why bitcoin
has been a thing which has been unnoticed, but is one
of the main research domains in the field of Computer
Science in modern days.
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